MITCHSLAPPING HARRY:

Master of the Senate: Mitch McConnell runs rings around Harry Reid (Fred Barnes, 02/19/2007, Weekly Standard)

The key tool in the hands of the Senate minority is the filibuster, which allows unlimited debate if 41 senators reject cloture, which shuts off debate after 30 hours. "If you have 41, you can dictate the process," McConnell says. "If you don't have 41, you get rolled." McConnell intends to keep Republicans from being rolled. So far, he and Republicans have defeated all four Democratic efforts to halt debate.

"There are two things you can do with 41 or more dissenters," according to McConnell. You can block a bill or a resolution or you can "shape" it. [...]

McConnell, after a dozen years of Republican rule in the Senate, has schooled Republicans on how to operate effectively as a minority. He recruited Martin Gold, an expert on minority rights in the Senate, to advise senators and their staff. The filibuster that stopped the Iraq debate, Gold says, "was a very early and very important test of whether the McConnell minority would stand up for itself or whether it would fracture." It showed Republicans would "not be railroaded."

They weren't railroaded when a bill boosting the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour reached the Senate floor in January. Democrats wanted a "clean" bill with only the wage hike. Republicans wanted tax cuts for small businesses that would be affected by the higher wage. Reid tried twice to halt debate and failed. So tax relief was added to the minimum wage bill. Republicans also used the filibuster to have a say on congressional ethics reform. McConnell mustered 46 votes to block the shutoff of the ethics debate.

McConnell wants a role in shaping the House-passed energy bill too, once it reaches the Senate. But he is bent on killing the legislation, already approved by the House, that would have the federal government negotiate drug prices in the Medicare prescription drug benefit program. "We're going to kill that proudly," he says. "It won't be a question of shaping."

The filibuster, even in the hands of as skilled a Senate leader as McConnell, has its limits. For instance, it won't help Republicans win confirmation of federal appeals courts nominees. "There's no easy way to extract nominees from committee," he says. The last three presidents got on average 17 appeals court nominees approved in their final two years, while facing a Senate ruled by the opposite party, McConnell says. To be fair, Democrats should allow at least that number to be confirmed now, he argues.

McConnell's first major venture in exploiting minority rights in the Senate came in 1994 when Democrats still had a majority. A campaign finance reform bill that would have imposed public financing on congressional races had passed both houses of Congress. McConnell consulted Senate secretary Elizabeth Letchworth to find out if there were any options left to block the legislation.

Letchworth told him three motions must be passed before conferees can be dispatched to iron out differences between the Senate and House bills. But of course nobody had ever filibustered those motions before, and she recommended against breaking new ground. That didn't stop McConnell. He succeeded in blocking the second motion. The bill died. Six weeks later, Republicans captured the Senate and House in the 1994 landslide.

Now, in the minority once more, McConnell is prepared to filibuster conferees again. He's wary of what might happen in a Senate-House conference on the minimum wage increase. The House passed a hike with no tax relief, and he doesn't want the Senate conferees to go along with that.