It makes me wonder how long Reid (and who else?) has been working on this. General consensus seems to be that this was an inspired piece of political jujitsu, with possibly historic consequences.
I have a theory about Congress, which is that there is often a moment when the effective majority switches, when the minority takes control of the agenda well before an election. It happened in 1994 when Gingrich forced the Crime Bill back to conference. It happened in 1996 when Kennedy forced the Senate to take up the minimum wage increase. After those events, the majority never quite had control of the agenda again.
I think the same thing just happened today when Harry Reid took the Senate into closed session to force a discussion of the delayed Intelligence Committee report on misuse of intelligence.
Bill Frist's ability to run the institution now lies completely in ruins.
This has implications for the politics of Plamegate and Iraq, of course, but it will affect other questions as well. One of them is the Nuclear Option. The conventional wisdom seems to be that if Democrats try to filibuster Alito, the Republicans in the "Gang of 14" will consider the deal broken and vote for the Nuclear Option.
http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/11/1/17053/0779
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