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THe point is that if none of the 7 democrats vote AGAINST cloture, the filibuster will fail (cloture will succeed). That is why the 7 have power. If there were only 4 democrats, Senator Reid would still be talking about how important filibusters were against Owen, instead of watching a MAJORITY of his caucus desert him.

81-18. When released from party loyalties, over HALF of the democrats voted against the filibuster of Owens. We need to write this in letters to every paper in the country. This shows that the Democrat filibuster was NOT a principled stand by the minority, but was rather an enforced party-line vote by a minority of the minority.

Only 18 democrats/socialists wanted to maintain the filibuster.

Do you think that we would have lost half of our votes in the nuclear option vote? My guess is that if they KNEW it was going to fail, we probably would have lost a LOT of votes, but not that many.

The 81-18 vote may have been a ploy by the democrats, but if so it was stupid. We need to advertise the truth of this vote everywhere. The Senate, when voting on Principle, OVERWHELMINGLY REJECTED the Democrat filibuster of judicial nominees. 4 OUT OF 5 Senators. Patrick Leahy, he of the "we will never let Owen have a vote because she is pure evil", voted to END debate.

I listened to Ben Nelson on C-Span, there were callers. I thought he sounded very reasonable, and in fact was thinking that it might be fun to trade him for Voinovich :->

It is possible that the red-state democrats ARE concerned with their constituents, and were looking for the chance to break out.

The democrats made a much bigger leap than the republicans. The republicans gave up NOTHING we actually had. We had never broken a filibuster. We had not gotten a vote on the nuclear option. We couldn't be sure of the Whip Count.

But simply by THREATENING the option, we broke the filibuster. It is not like total victory, but we didn't fire a shot. We didn't try the nuclear option and FAIL. Nobody can make the argument stick that we had a power grab, because we didn't vote for it. We simply raised the level of rhetoric, and the democrats blinked.

We don't get blamed for breaking senate rules, and the democrats broke in two. They WERE winning with the filibuster. They had successfully chased three or more nominees, and were blocking many more. And with a stroke of the pen, they now have LOST the filibuster for most cases.

And all they got in return was a "promise" that if they don't filibuster, we won't try the nuclear option. And they didn't even know if the nuclear option would work or not. They got almost nothing. We are back to where we were 4 years ago. We got the democrats to agree that payback is done and there is a clean slate -- no more "You blocked 61 judges" crap.

There are bad things and bad possiblities in this deal, but it is not a disaster (or at least it may not be).

We'll see when the first non-approved nominee comes up for debate. That will force the 7 traitor RINOs to put up or shut up. They will have to go on record voting against cloture, which means they will now have filibustered a judge and will have lost the ability to campaign saying that they never technically voted to filibuster. The most this does is to buy the Democrats a few weeks until they call a vote on one of the "unapproved" nominees. I think the RINOs were counting on Frist to not risk embarrassment by scheduling a vote he thinks he might lose. Frist needs to call that bluff.