NYT- Behind Scenes, Aides Take On Filibuster Fight

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: May 20, 2005
WASHINGTON, May 19 - Martin B. Gold was a young Congressional aide 26 years ago when Republicans, beleaguered and outflanked in a Democrat-controlled Senate, summoned him to their rescue.

The Democratic leader, Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, was performing a procedural tap dance around the minority, outmaneuvering Republicans with his mastery of the Senate's arcane rules. So Howard H. Baker Jr., the Republican leader, hired Mr. Gold. His colleagues' instructions: "Watch Byrd."

He did.

Today, with the Republicans in control, Mr. Gold, a prominent Washington lobbyist and unpaid adviser to the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, is among a handful of savvy strategists working behind the scenes to orchestrate the delicate drama over the judicial confirmations playing out on the Senate stage. Mr. Gold, an author of a Harvard law journal article laying the groundwork for the confrontation, may be the most influential of the bunch, revered by Republicans as a legal whiz and reviled by Democrats as a manipulator of the rules.

"I think he's sold these guys a bill of goods," said one of Mr. Gold's Democratic adversaries, Kevin Kayes, a former assistant parliamentarian of the Senate who is now chief counsel to the Democratic leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada. "Marty's name on that document somehow gives this credibility because people around here respected him. But I'm not sure that's the case after what's gone on here."

~anip~
more: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/politics/20players.html