Senate Republicans succeeded in a filibuster by refusing to end debate on Senator Jim Webb’s S. 2012 which would have supported our brave service men and women by placing limits on National Guard and reserve deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and mandate more downtime at home before they could be redeployed

Senator Tom Harkin supported the bill and released this statement of support on Monday:

It is simply unacceptable that our troops time at home has often been cut short, depriving them of the time they need to recover from combat, complete additional training and spend precious time with their families. This systematic abuse of re-deploying our troops with little down time has placed enormous stress on our troops and their families, and has brought our Army to its breaking point. Having an established amount of time between deployments is crucial to protecting our troops’ mental and physical wellbeing and providing some stability and predictability for military families.

The cloture vote in the Senate fell short of the 60 votes required to end debate with Republicans Norm Coleman, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, John Sununu, Chuck Hagel, Gordon Smith and John Warner breaking ranks with their party to move the bill to a full up-or-down vote.

Jonathan Singer of MyDD.com has a great write up of the vote as well as Senator Webb’s statement following the vote which you can read by clicking here.