[mwl1]

Now that Breaux has made it official, then I think the Rats will not even try to monetarily defend Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina, and instead spend all their money on saving their seats in LA and FL.

Exactly, the significance of the Breaux retirement is not capturing the Louisiana seat, although that is clearly a possibility, but rather it forces the RATS to devote resources to defend another open seat, thus bankrupting their efforts elsewhere.

A gain of 5-6 seats is clearly doable next year... for those who assert that this still won't get our judicial nominees approved, this is wrong. Anything over 55 votes will scare enough RATS up for re-election in 2006 to bolt and seek political cover. We can bribe the rest with goodies. 55-56 seats is about the threshold we need to open up the bulk of the federal circuit court appointments.

[Pubbie]

And then Ben Nelson of Nebraska will switch in exchange for a Committee chairmanship, and then we can get Jeffords to switch back in exchange for the Dairy Compact in Vermont - so we could end up with 58 seats - or more - if Jack Ryan can hold the seat in Illinois.

[Galactic Overlord-In-Chief]

In some cases we do get 55 votes for cloture, the 51 Republicans plus Breaux, Bill and Ben Nelson, and Miller. Picking up North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida alone will boost the total to 58. Depending on how well we do, we could end up with 60 cloture votes or something very close to it.