The boys and girls of the Senate are taking this week off, of course.
I wonder, though, whether Brer Reid is using his leisure to contemplate what the Dem response will be if (more likely, when) the GOP decide to get the Feingold res back onto the floor.
I can understand why they didn't try before the break: corporate welfare comes before partisan games! But I'm pretty sure they'll be able to find a slot in their schedule when they get back.
Some in the lefty 'sphere seem to be thinking that the res is a long-term Dem winner: over at FDL, for instance.
Supposedly, all those Dem senators who tried to hide from the media last Monday week are now coming round to seeing the offensive partisan potential; and the GOP are quaking for the same reason.
If true - I'm open to evidence but currently unconvinced - all the more reason why Specter will kick it out of Judiciary pronto, and the Video Doctor will whisk it off the Calendar.
What are the Dems going to do? Filibuster their own resolution?
All that old up or down vote shtick gets wheeled out again, the usual media suspects do their usual thing - anything but discussing executive excess and constitutional crisis with a bunch of effete elite pettifoggers.
And the polls - my recollection is that, in early 2003, the polls were showing as large a percentage opposing an Iraq invasion without UNSC approval as now oppose the Bush line on wiretapping.
And I suspect wiretapping has much less salience for voters than had the decision whether or not to invade Iraq.
The other thing, of course, is - they remember Alito. It should have been a really tough assignment to get this guy onto the bench: the Dems made it so easy, you'd almost think the GOP was peeved they'd taken the fun out of it!
On the substance, the Dems have the law and the public (half of it, at least) on their side; they also have the special rules of the SIC which would allow Rockefeller (an entire one, at least) to launch his own official investigation.
They've made no progress.
The Feingold res was a stunt. A very good one. It was doomed to glorious failure, as Feingold always knew.
It was absolutely no substitute for the action on the substance - such as an SIC investigation - that the Dems have failed to take.
Final thing - what's the hard count?
Remember the Alito nonsense when Reid said there wasn't the votes for a filibuster, and some twat - which may or may not have been Durbin (brain fuzzy, can't be certain) - trumpeted 33 votes against cloture.
Reid, on this occasion, was, of course, right: say, a 20 vote hard count. All the rest were guys who said, Well, of course, if you were one short, I wouldn't be the guy to leave you hanging.
It was just that none of them wanted to be Votes 21 through 40!
With all this subterranean mo that the res is supposedly generating, how many cast iron votes has Russ got tucked in his back pocket?
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