The base bill will be the Warner-Levin resolution (S Con Res 4 revised to S Con Res 7), but dealt with as a bill, S 470.

(This piece says that the text is being taken as a bill, rather than as a res, for parliamentary reasons.

Damn! I've not the faintest idea what that means: of course, a con res is perfected by passage of the same text by both houses, without need of prez signature. There are slightly different procedures for bypassing reference to committees. But - that's all I got.)

Reid's objective is evidently to get some res passed; McConnell's is to get an outing for a couple of his own boys' pieces of work, and, if possible, put some Dem mods on the spot.

Thus, the Times lede:

[McConnell] said Friday that his party would unite to block Senate debate next week on a bipartisan resolution opposing President Bush's troop buildup in Iraq unless the Democrats allowed votes on at least two Republican alternatives.

Scaree!

It gets scarier:

Mr. McConnell said even Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who is the chief author of the bipartisan proposal, and other Republicans backing his plan had agreed to prevent the resolution from reaching the floor Monday if Democrats did not agree to that demand.

Party leaders are contractually obliged to dish up that sort of bollocks.

What are the GOP alternatives?

There's McCain-Lieberman - that's just the press release: no items returned on a search on THOMAS for measures including Iraq sponsored or cosponsored by either guy in the 110th.

The release says

The new resolution includes eleven specific benchmarks for the Iraqi government and requires that Iraqis demonstrate visible progress is being made toward political and economic stability.

According to the Times,

A second likely alternative would be a Republican-backed resolution opposing any cutoff of money for added troops, a potentially tougher vote for some Democrats who want to retain that as a future option.

S Con Res 7 (in paragraph (4)) already says that

the Congress should not take any action that will endanger United States military forces in the field, including the elimination or reduction of funds for troops in the field, as such an action with respect to funding would undermine their safety or harm their effectiveness in pursuing their assigned missions.

That could, I think, cover the funding of additional troops from out of theater, as well as the cost of extending tours for troops already there - if in-theater troops needed the additions to maintain their effectiveness.

Of course, since, all one's talking about is a nonbinding res, I'm not clear how much pettifogging about its phrasing is worthwhile!

How's the pre-game going? The fact that McConnell's threat to filibuster is now a conditional one - only kicking in if Reid doesn't give him votes on those GOP alternatives - must be something of a win for Uncle Harry. (Though I'm not clear how much GOP support there would have been for an unconditional filibuster.)

[Of course, much to the distress of certain Kossacks, the pot likker filibuster of yore is no more. The mere threat keeps the measure in question off the floor. The 1997 Fisk and Chemerinsky Stanford Law Review article is the best history: used to be freely available online but apparently now no longer is.]

But Harry is fighting a multi-front war. One of those fronts is against the refuseniks led by (or consisting of) the Feingold-Dodd combo.

He'll need at least two cloture motions to pass: on the motion to proceed and on the bill/res itself. A CQ piece says

A cloture vote in the Senate is expected Monday on a motion to proceed to a measure (S 470) that is the bill form of S Con Res 7, a non-binding resolution that would express disagreement with the troop buildup while vowing to protect funding for troops in Iraq.

(This is as stated in the Daily Digest I referred to in my earlier piece.)

CQ says

Despite bipartisan support, it remains unclear whether the underlying measure has the necessary 60 votes to break a possible filibuster.

I assume that, given McConnell's strategy, cloture on the MTP will zip through.

Cloture on the bill itself? If McCain can get some of his language into S 470, and muddy the waters even further (if that's possible), McConnell may prefer to make no effort to challenge it, and take the stance that it's really only a Dem charade not worth dignifying with an Alamo.

To deprive the bill of cloture would require Feingold to assemble a decent-sized band of sans-culottes ready to vent their disgust at Gang of 14-type manoeuvers. (The fact that the bill is nonbinding tends to weaken any charge of treachery laid against them by go along Dems.)

And it would also require most GOP senators to fail to support cloture, thus abandoning the chance (electorally useful to a fair few of them) of being able, mildly and symbolically, to distance themselves from the regime's disastrous war.

[This piece compares and contrasts the texts of S Con Res 4 and 7 - which saves the rest of us a tedious task. This page lists the current Iraq initiatives in Congress; the same site does the same for Iran.]

Update [2007-2-3 16:10:45 by skeptic06]:

Let's take a look at the possibilities for amendment on the Dem side of the aisle - from the initiatives list linked above.

One advantage of using a bill rather than a con res for the base text to be debated is (I think) that the bill will be susceptible of amendments which are binding.

Of course, any free-standing bill seeking to limit the regime's actions in Iraq is, assuming it passes Congress, guaranteed to garner a veto. (Which is the attraction of bundling binding legislation into must-pass bills - such as the upcoming Iraq supplemental.)

But - the fact that a bill has been used as a vehicle for the Warner-Levin text implies an intention to confront Bush with the need to get out his veto pen.

So - what might be on offer?

Several variations are available:

• binding and nonbinding;
• with and without explicit funding cutoff;
• requiring withdrawal or just negating the surge.

So, for instance, Feingold has bills mandating withdrawal with (S 448) and without (S 121) explicit funding cutoff.

The Kennedy bill (S 233 and S 287 - same text, S 287 is on the Calendar) denies funding for the surge without Congressional approval.

The Obama bill (S 433) mandates a troop ceiling at pre-surge levels and a phased withdrawal, without explicit funding cutoffs.

Clearly, if McConnell is going to get votes on some of his boys' offerings, Dem senators will expect votes on some of theirs.

Of course, if one of these beefier binding provisions got added to the Warner bill, that could constitute something of a killer amendment. My guess is that the whole thing is so murky and hard to explain to Joe Sixpack that the conflictedness essential to a killer amendment situation simply doesn't exist.

(Or, put another way, if a majority want to end up with a nice watered-down bill, they won't spoil it by getting hung up on cross-cutting amendments that, come election time, their opponents won't be able to hang round their necks.)

[On the subject of pot likker filibusters - the master of the art was Huey Long: his effort on June 12/13 1935 against renewal of the NRA is recounted in a Time piece from June 24 1935 (the Time archive has been available free for a while - for how long, who knows).]