Dramatic rumblings in the Senate

Senator Harry Reid pulled a dramatic power play on the floor of the Senate yesterday, catching the GOP leadership by surprise and scoring a major victory. Apparently Reid made an impassioned speech about the stalled investigation into intelligence about Iraq and how it was used to justify the war -- the committee in charge got as far as assessing the CIA's performance, but didn't look at Administration use of the information (the intended second phase of the undertaking). Reid claimed that the Libby indictment gives new impetus to examining the actions and motivations of the Bushies, and he invoked a rare procedural maneouver to get his way: in the middle of other business, he used "Rule 21" to call for a closed session of the Senate, which meant chasing out all the staff, cameras, and observers, and waiting for all absent Senators to arrive for the mandatory event. I'm not entirely clear on what went on after that, but apparently the threat is that Senate Democrats would continue to shut down normal business until the investigation was reopened. And it worked:

Senators haggled behind closed doors for a bit over two hours, then emerged with a deal: Frist and Reid each will appoint three senators to a task force to review the status of the Intelligence Committee's investigation into prewar intelligence.

A report is due in two weeks.

Amazing. The Republicans were apoplectic over this move, so Democrats have to walk carefully lest they find they've waked the sleeping giant. However, Reid and co. clearly sent a message here that

1. they want the investigation completed,
   
2. they're not going to let the Alito circus preempt the scandal about Administration misuse of intelligence and critics, and
   
3. they're prepared to use disruption as a source of power.

This last one is particularly important, as a "shot across the bow" in anticipation of upcoming Senate wrangling. The Democrats are not excited with Alito for Supreme Court, and they may decide to filibuster his nomination; if the Republicans think that countering by ending the filibuster option would be without cost, they've just seen otherwise. A "nuclear option" (see prev. discussion of that term here) would mean nothing getting done by anybody...

There's discussion of this dramatic show all over the place, but probably some good places to start are the analysis by Hunter at dailyKos of the significance of this event, and the CultureKitchen summary of what happened, which has links to video, transcripts, and tons of other bloggy goodness.

Update: Tristero at Hullabaloo expresses some pleasure and caution about this gambit.