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The three-plus-year push for a constitutional amendment on money and politics, leading to a bill sponsored by Senator Tom Udall, D-New Mexico, ended with a predictable thud in the Senate Thursday morning when 54 senators, including all Democrats, voted for it, and all 42 Republicans voted against it. Since two-thirds of the Senate is necessary to pass an amendment, and no Republicans indicated any interest, it never had a chance.

The push for the 28th Amendment was a desperate reaction to the latest series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have unleashed an unprecedented flood of secret money into American elections. As Steven Rosenfeld  reported, super-donors have more power and influence than ever, thanks to many court decisions leading up to Citizens United. In response, a huge campaign by dozens of liberal advocacy groups and a relentless Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) garnered more than 1.5 million online signatures to line up votes for a 28th Amendment in the hope it would pass a first hurdle in a long, virtually impossible path. In other words, given today’s hyper-partisan political landscape, the biggest effort to engage federal lawmakers on the topic of rescuing American democracy was fated to fail.

On Monday, it was first thought Senate Republicans would prevent debate, which would have killed the amendment on the spot, since five Republican votes were needed to begin debate and break a filibuster. But then some members of the GOP saw utility in allowing the debate to advance to score some points. The vote to open debate was 79-18 and immediately seized by groups like MoveOn.org and DCCC, and hyped as a harbinger of big progress, but that was far from true. When Laurence O’Donnell shared his delight on his MSNBC show that night, Minnesota Democratic Sen. Al Franken, had to break the spell and tell him sorry, but this is all a maneuver by those sneaky Republicans to run down the clock to prevent any progress on issues like minimum wage before a recess.