According to the New York Times, Democrat party leaders have announced that they do not have enough votes in the U.S. Senate to pass the most recent climate and energy bill to be proposed in the body. 60 votes are needed to ensure the passage of a bill in the Senate and it appears the leadership was several votes short of that threshold. This was the third attempt to introduce climate legislation in the Senate in the last year. While the House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACESA) in June 2009, the Senate failed to act upon it before Scott Brown’s surprise electoral victory in Massachusetts upset the political calculus by depriving Democrats of their 60-vote caucus. An attempt in the spring of 2010 to introduce a scaled-back version of the ACESA in the form of the American Power Act of 2010 (APA) failed when the bipartisan group sponsoring it (Senators Kerry, Lieberman, and Graham) split apart and the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico caused many environmentalists to withdraw their support from the proposal, which contained plans for increased deep-water drilling. The most recent effort scaled the ACESA back further still, limiting its proposed cap-and-trade program to the utility sector.