"But he was a solid vote for us, which those grades indicate."

And Valentine cast a solid vote today on protecting him in the Nov. 18 expansion draft.

The result of that has been a very solid vote in the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy, with no votes against the report.

Mr. Williams said he remained confident that he had 7 solid votes on the 13-member council to enact the plan.

And Hackett gave a solid vote of support for Vinny Testaverde to return as the starting quarterback.

Kandahar is the hometown of President Hamid Karzai and is expected to return a solid vote for the incumbent.

The reason was the absolute terror tactics of the SFI and that Muslims constituted the most solid vote bank of the Communists.

Mr. Feingold and Mr. McCain conceded that they had no solid vote counts and did not know whether their new approach could succeed.

There are only three solid votes on the court to overturn Roe: Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Scalia and Thomas.

The Post, meanwhile, criticized Congressman Perlmutter for being "a solid vote for the Democratic majority" and for supporting "the Obama Administration's over-reaching agenda."

The solid vote of the Judiciary Committee's 10 Democrats ended what Judge Pickering said were his hopes to cap his career with a few years on the appeals court.

"You could maybe get one or two or three, but when you have that far to go, even the solid votes can desert you, since they don't want to be on the losing side."

So here's a solid vote in support of Mr. Thompson, a coach whose iron control of his players and contempt for the press ordinarily earns him little favor in this corner.

"The Young Man From Atlanta" and "The Last Night of Ballyhoo" look like dead certainties, and "An American Daughter" gets a solid vote, despite poor reviews.

The modernizing Republicans who had founded the party in 1854 looked askance at the undisguised corruption of Ulysses S. Grant and his war veterans, bolstered by the solid vote of freedmen.

Still, Pettitte is targeted to pitch a decisive Game 7, a solid vote of confidence for a starter who entered the post-season perilously after going 3-5 with a 6.14 e.r.a. in August and September.

The 1857 Congressional rejection of the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution was the first multi-party solid-North vote, and that solid vote was anti-slavery to support the democratic majority voting in the Kansas Territory.

A Congressional Quarterly survey found that if current senators do not change their votes and new senators stick to the position they took in their campaigns, there will be 47 solid votes in favor of drilling.

Some Brooklyn Democrats contend that Mr. de Blasio had 15 solid votes and that Mr. Lopez might have secured others had he stood forcefully behind the candidacy of the borough's native son.

Minton abhorred racial segregation and provided a solid vote to strike down the school segregation practices at issue in 1954's landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education; it was among the few decisions in which he sided against the government.

There are three solid votes for the year-round calendar from members representing the inner-city districts composed primarly of black, Hispanic and Asian students and three votes against it from members whose districts are those in primarily white middle-class areas.

It was hard to see how he would reach that number, with only Representatives Amo Houghton and Peter T. King, both of New York, and Mark Edward Souder of Indiana still solid votes against impeachment.

The labor group hires business agents, lawyers, and organizers, and is beginning to intimidate legislators by the strength of its solid vote; and more directly, in the near future, it will attempt to control legislation by capturing it bodily through the ballot-box.

Their arrival is not only crucial for Mr. Trump, who has been struggling to emerge from millions of dollars of debt, but is also a "solid vote of confidence in New York City," Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said.

The county has long been as hard-core Republican as any in America, and any Republican running statewide has traditionally relied on a solid vote there to offset the usually big Democratic vote in Los Angeles and San Francisco.