The nomination of David Hayes to be Deputy Secretary of the Interior was blocked today when a cloture vote on his confirmation failed, 57-39.

I know Harry Reid has been insistent of late that the Senate get moving on pending nominations, and it's of course totally ridiculous that the chief architect of today's delay, Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) actually finds nothing wrong with Hayes but blocked him over issues involving cancellation of oil and gas leases, but what are we to make of this vote?

We "need 60" to get this done. We got 57 on the record.

Number 58 was actually Reid himself, but he voted no for procedural reasons. (Any Senator who votes with the prevailing side can later move to reconsider that vote, so Reid ended up voting no in order to reserve the right to bring the nomination up again.)

Not voting today, though, were Senators Ted Kennedy (D-MA), John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Mikulski (D-MD). Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) both voted for cloture.

I'm sure Kennedy, Kerry and Mikulski all had good reasons for missing the vote. For instance, Kennedy's got his health issues. Kerry, I understand, was in Massachusetts attending a service member's funeral. But had they been there, they could have been votes number 59, 60 and 61.

Now, it probably would have been a good idea to have checked in with the Democratic Caucus to see who was and wasn't going to be on hand for the vote. And it might have occurred to people to check and see if maybe Olympia Snowe would go along. Maybe not so much Jon Kyl. I don't know what the dynamics of checking in with Republicans really are.

But either way, what this points out once again is that having 60 members in the Democratic Caucus doesn't actually translate all the time into having the magical 60 votes needed to guarantee your ability to move your agenda. Lots of things can happen to get in the way of making it work. You can lose Dems. You can gain Republicans. You can have people out of DC for the day.

It seems trivial sometimes, but it shouldn't be forgotten, given how much emphasis has been put on this "magic number" for so many years.