FISA politicking

The Senate is "post-cloture" right now on the Senate Intel bill and soon Senator Dodd will offer his immunity-stripping amendment on the floor. It will likely fail. Then, as I understand it, he'll just start talking. I'm not really sure if there's anything Reid can do to pre-empt him, and I'm not really sure how long Dodd can hold out, but as long as Dodd is talking, the Senate can't take up the Omnibus spending bill, an extremely weak CHIP reauthorization, and any other Senate business. So there's a lot of potential for bad press here.

Either way, as soon as Dodd's exhausted his ability to delay the bill, (and as soon as the other senators, including, apparently, Leahy offer their amendments) it only needs 51 votes to pass. And it surely has that. Sigh. It would, as I've said before, be preferable under the circumstances for the two bodies to let this thing fall apart in conference, and then let the Protect America Act expire. But the way things have been going, it doesn't look like that's what's going to happen.