One reason the omnibus spending bill did not find the votes it needed last night was resistance to its change in Cuba policy. The bill, as currently written, would loosen trade restrictions by allowing more frequent visits to Cuba. More specifically, it would forbid the use of funds to enforce the law against visiting Cuba more than once every three years.

Senators Mel Martinez (R., Fla.), Bill Nelson (D., Fla.), and Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) were the ones vocally resisting the change. Here is part of Menendez’s speech on the floor last night. It is interesting that the pro-choice Democrat mentions of Cuba’s abortion policy and the imprisonment of one doctor who refused to perform them:

[W]e are being asked to vote for an omnibus bill that has provisions that change a significant foreign policy as it relates to the United States and Cuba…[I]f we were talking about Burma, if we were talking about what happens in the Sudan–if we were talking about any other part of the world, we would see the same attention being given to the human rights activists, the democracy activists, the political prisoners inside of Cuba who languish each and every day, and their crime is simply to try to create a civil society with the benefits of the freedoms we enjoy here in the United States…
There was a time when we used to help human rights activists and democracy activists in the world; when we put an international spotlight on people such as Lech Walesa in Poland; when we did it with Vaclav Havel in the Czech Republic; when we did it with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the former Soviet Union. By creating that spotlight on those individuals, we gave them the opportunity not to be harassed on a daily basis, as Cuba’s democracy activists are, in jail and in prison and sentenced, sometimes for a quarter of a century for some minor act that, in fact, we would enjoy here as one of our fundamental freedoms, such as wearing a simple white bracelet that says “cambio”–change.
“Change” in the last election in the United States would get you elected President. Say “change” in Cuba, it sends you to jail. Yet there is silence. There is silence. It is deafening. It is deafening…It is amazing to me that people do not know who Oscar Elias Biscetis is, an Afro-Cuban doctor who ultimately was sent to jail for 25 years simply because he refused to perform the abortions the regime called upon him to do. He protested it and he was sent to jail for 25 years; or Marta Beatrice Roque, who, in fact, languishes with health issues, and every time she goes out, most recently to visit a U.S. diplomat, gets beaten along the way; or Antunes, who is on a hunger strike trying to create limited openings in a civil society and protesting the beating and incarceration of another human rights activist.

At this point, it remains unclear whether the Cuba policy change will be sacrificed in order to propel the omnibus through its cloture vote on Monday.