{"id":4123,"date":"2005-05-04T10:26:58","date_gmt":"2005-05-04T14:26:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/4123.html"},"modified":"2005-05-04T10:26:58","modified_gmt":"2005-05-04T14:26:58","slug":"the-nuclear-option-is-imminent-or-its-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/the-nuclear-option-is-imminent-or-its-not\/","title":{"rendered":"The nuclear option is imminent … or it’s not"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Hill ran an interesting item<\/a> today about the latest nuclear option developments, but you’ll need some kind of secret Republican decoder ring to decipher the whole thing because the article includes some conflicting updates.<\/p>\n

For what it’s worth, Bill Frist, after several weeks of hemming and hawing, is telling allies that he’ll execute the tactic sometime in May.<\/p>\n

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s (R-Tenn.) chief of staff has told conservative activist leaders and business-community representatives that Frist will soon trigger the so-called “nuclear option” to end threatened Democratic filibusters of President Bush’s judicial nominees this month.<\/p>\n

The chief of staff, Eric Ueland, said the event will take place in “less than a month,” according to several people who attended a closed-door meeting late last week.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sounds pretty definitive, right? Well, it might be if a) Frist hasn’t been making similar comments for a couple of months; and b) Frist’s audience doesn’t want to wait that long.<\/p>\n

[S]ocial conservatives are anticipating from conversations with Frist’s staff that the controversial move will take place next week and are predicting a conservative backlash if Senate Republicans delay any longer.<\/p>\n

A conservative lobbyist came away from a separate conversation with Frist’s staff convinced that the disaffected Republicans will make their move in “a matter of days.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Manuel Miranda (yes, that<\/em> Manuel Miranda<\/a>), who’s heading up a Heritage Foundation initiative on the nuclear option, added, “We all believe that it will be next week. I believe it’s concrete…. Were it to be delayed beyond the next week, the Senate GOP should expect tens of thousands of angry phone calls and faxes to tie up their lines.”
\n
\nThis may seem silly — who cares if it’s the second week in May or the fourth week in May? — but it is apparently of critical interest to the right-wing groups pulling Frist’s strings on this issue.<\/p>\n

“Pretty soon the steam starts to go out of it,” Lessner said of grassroots conservative support if lawmakers do not act soon. “In terms of maintaining grassroots intensity, people have to see progress being made, more than press conference after press conference with just the threat [of the constitutional option] being made.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which leads us, of course, right back to where we’ve been for so long: Does Frist have the votes? If the votes were in place, the Majority Leader’s office wouldn’t stick to some vague promise about “sometime this month.” If anything, the ambiguity of the pledge only reinforces the belief that he needs more time to twist arms and pressure his way to 50 votes.<\/p>\n

Those beads of sweat gathering on Frist’s forehead are there for a reason.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Hill ran an interesting item today about the latest nuclear option developments, but you’ll need some kind of secret Republican decoder ring to decipher the whole thing because the article includes some conflicting updates. For what it’s worth, Bill Frist, after several weeks of hemming and hawing, is telling allies that he’ll execute the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}