WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Senate's top Republican decided Thursday to force a showdown on Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito early next week, with the two Democratic senators from Massachusetts pushing to block a vote.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist filed a motion to cut off debate on the Alito nomination after his Democratic counterpart, Minority Leader Harry Reid, objected to a move by GOP leaders to schedule a final vote on his confirmation Monday afternoon.

Frist's motion, which requires 60 votes under Senate rules, will come up for a vote at 4:30 p.m. Monday. If successful, senators will then vote on Alito's nomination at 11 a.m. Tuesday, with a simple majority of 51 votes needed for approval.

Frist's move came as Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts was lobbying his Democratic colleagues to filibuster the Alito nomination -- an uphill fight, given that none of the chamber's 55 Republicans have opposed his confirmation and three Democrats are on the record supporting it.

"Judge Alito's confirmation would be an ideological coup on the Supreme Court," Kerry said in a written statement.

"We can't afford to see the court's swing vote, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, replaced with a far-right ideologue like Samuel Alito."

The White House expressed confidence that Alito's supporters had the 60 votes needed to cut off a filibuster, a maneuver allowed under Senate rules to block a vote by extending debate indefinitely.

Earlier Thursday, Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, who is in charge of rounding up his colleagues for key votes, also played down the possibility of a filibuster, though he said no decision had been made.

"One of the first responsibilities of someone in Congress is to learn how to count," the Illinois Democrat said. "Having made a count, I have come to the conclusion it is highly unlikely that a filibuster would succeed."

Democrats split

Two Democrats announced Thursday that they would vote for the 55-year-old Alito: Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Sen. Tim Johnson of South Dakota. Both represent states that Bush carried in the 2004 presidential election.

In a speech on the Senate floor, Byrd, the longest-serving Democrat in the Senate, said he refused "simply to toe the party line when it comes to Supreme Court justices."

"My considered judgment ... leads me to believe [Alito] to be an honorable man, a man who loves his country, loves his Constitution and a man who will give of his best," said Byrd, who faces re-election in November. "Can we really ask for more?"

Johnson said that while he was "troubled" by some of Alito's views, "I cannot accept an argument that his views are so radical that the Senate is justified in denying his confirmation."

He also said he would oppose any filibuster of the nomination.

Sources close to Kerry, who lost to Bush in the 2004 race, told CNN that the senator was calling colleagues from Switzerland, where he was attending the World Economic Forum. He announced his decision to support a filibuster Wednesday at a meeting of his Democratic colleagues.

The White House believes Alito's supporters have the 60 votes they need to block any filibuster, spokesman Steve Schmidt said, and suggested that Kerry's move was designed to buttress a possible 2008 presidential run.

Bush said Thursday he was looking forward to an "up-or-down vote" in the Senate and praised Alito, a judge on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, as a man of "character and integrity."

Bush tapped Alito for the job after his White House counsel, Harriet Miers, withdrew her nomination.

Republicans and the White House are pushing to have the final vote before Bush gives his State of the Union speech January 31, Senate sources have said.
'Vote of a generation'

Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy also said Thursday he would support a filibuster, though he described it as "an uphill climb."

"This is a vote of a generation and a test of conscience," Kennedy said in a statement. "Judge Alito does not share the values of equality and justice that make this country strong. He does not deserve a place on the highest court of the land."

In the floor debate of Alito's nomination, other Democrats have been highly critical of the nomination, saying he would threaten civil liberties and fail to act as a check on executive power.

Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the Judiciary Committee's ranking Democrat, had supported Chief Justice John Roberts' nomination last fall.

But this time, he said, "I am concerned that if we confirm this nominee it will further erode the checks and balances" between the branches of government.

Kennedy told reporters that at least five Democrats are on board supporting the filibuster, and he said he expects others to join the effort.

In addition to Byrd and Johnson, Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska has said he will support Alito. Earlier Thursday, Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana said she would oppose a filibuster.

With their support, and with the 55 Senate Republicans expected to oppose any filibuster, GOP leaders would need to find only one more Democrat to thwart a filibuster attempt.

In May, Byrd, Nelson, Landrieu and four other Democrats joined seven Republicans in agreeing to oppose Democratic filibusters of some Bush judicial nominees and any attempt by Republican leaders to change Senate rules to end the practice, except under "extraordinary circumstances." So far, that agreement has held.

The other Democrats in the group, known as the "Gang of 14," are Sens. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Ken Salazar of Colorado.

In 1991, the Democratic-controlled Senate was planning an investigation into whether Republicans had conducted secret negotiations with Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist regime during the 1980 campaign, when Jimmy Carter was still President and Iran was holding 52 Americans hostage.

The unresolved hostage crisis destroyed Carter’s reelection hopes and gave an important boost to Ronald Reagan when the hostages were released on Jan. 20, 1981, immediately after he was sworn in as President and George H.W. Bush became Vice President.

A decade after those events, some Democrats wanted to get to the bottom of recurring allegations that George Bush Sr., a former CIA director, had joined clandestine negotiations with Iran in fall 1980 that may have delayed release of the hostages for political gain, what was called the “October Surprise” mystery.

Meanwhile, Republicans were worried that a full-scale October Surprise investigation might implicate Bush in near-treasonous talks with an enemy state and devastate his 1992 reelection campaign. Confirmation of the allegations also would have eviscerated the legitimacy of the Reagan-Bush era.

So, in November 1991, Republican leaders used the filibuster to block funding for the investigation. The Democrats mustered 51 votes – a majority – but fell short of the 60 votes needed for cloture. A fully funded investigation was prevented.

Historical Marker

The Republican success in blocking a full Senate probe received little attention at the time, but represented an important historical marker. It was an early indication of how neoconservative journalists, then rising inside the national news media, could collaborate with Republicans to shape the information reaching the American people.

The preponderance of evidence now suggests that in 1980, Republicans – most likely including Ronald Reagan’s campaign chief William Casey and then-vice presidential nominee George H.W. Bush – did negotiate with representatives of Iran’s Islamic government behind Carter’s back. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The Imperium’s Quarter Century” or Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

But exposure of those secret dealings, a prequel to the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostage schemes of 1985-86, would not only have sunk George H.W. Bush’s reelection hopes in 1992. The revelations would have exposed collaboration by Israel’s right-wing Likud government in the October Surprise scheme. Likud wanted Carter ousted in 1980 because he had pressured Israel to make major concessions to the Palestinians. [See David Kimche's The Last Option.]

If revealed, the truth had the potential to hurt some very powerful people – and to change the direction of American history.

So, as the October Surprise secrets began to spill out in 1991, the increasingly neoconservative New Republic, which had strong ties to the Likud bloc in Israel, swung into action, publishing a cover story in fall 1991 that purported to debunk the October Surprise allegations.

At the center of the New Republic article – and a similar one published by Newsweek – was a complex alibi for the whereabouts of Casey on a key weekend in July 1980 when one witness, Iranian businessman Jamshid Hashemi, alleged that Casey met with Iranian emissaries in Madrid.

ABC’s “Nightline” had discovered that Casey had taken an unannounced trip to London on that July 1980 weekend for a World War II historical conference – and there appeared to be enough time in Casey’s schedule for a side trip to Madrid.

However, in their debunking articles, the New Republic and Newsweek cited attendance records for the World War II conference, supposedly accounting for enough of Casey’s time to exclude the two-day meeting in Madrid that Hashemi had described.

The two magazine articles had enormous effect on Washington’s conventional wisdom, which had been caught off-guard five years earlier by the Iran-Contra disclosures and would have looked even sillier if the history of the 1980 election also needed to be rewritten – with Reagan and George Bush Sr. as the villains. So the debunking articles were warmly received by influential Washingtonians.

Eventually, however, the New Republic and Newsweek debunking stories would be shown to be false. The magazines had misinterpreted the London conference attendance records and had put Casey at a crucial conference session, which he had actually skipped.

Inside Newsweek, investigative reporter Craig Unger later told me that he had been shocked by the magazine’s disingenuous work on the “window” of Casey’s known whereabouts. “They knew the window was not real,” Unger said of his Newsweek editors. “It was the most dishonest thing that I’ve been through in my life in journalism.”

But the falsity of the New Republic and Newsweek articles was not known in November 1991 when the Senate considered funding a thorough investigation of the October Surprise charges. Indeed, the two bogus stories represented the centerpiece of the Republican argument against proceeding with the investigation.

Dole’s Filibuster

Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole led the fight against the October Surprise investigation, much as he had spearheaded attempts to discredit the work of Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, who was slowly deconstructing the Republican cover-up of the Iran-Contra scandal.

On Nov. 22, 1991, Dole mounted a filibuster against any independent Senate inquiry of the allegations that the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostage deals had been, in effect, the second act of secret Republican negotiations with Iran’s radical mullahs. Dole invoked party discipline to defeat a cloture vote on funding for the probe.

Though denied the money, a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee still sponsored a small-scale investigation, with attorney Reid Weingarten hired as the lead investigator. But Weingarten found the lack of money only one of the limitations on his investigative efforts, he later told me.

As the probe proceeded, Republican Senators Mitch McConnell and Jesse Helms summoned Weingarten into a closed-door meeting in which McConnell brow-beat Weingarten with personal insults. For his part, Helms barred Weingarten’s investigators from interviewing witnesses outside Washington.

Though hamstrung by lack of funds and Republican obstructions, Weingarten did make some significant discoveries.

Weingarten obtained testimony corroborating claims that Casey had known Cyrus Hashemi, Jamshid Hashemi’s brother who allegedly also took part in the Madrid meetings. Plus, the Senate investigators found that some FBI wiretaps of Cyrus Hashemi in 1980 might have been intentionally erased.

Weingarten found, too, that key Casey records – his 1980 passport and several pages from his personal calendar – were missing and that the Casey family was withholding documents. (Casey, who was Reagan’s first CIA director, had died in 1987.)

But, running out of money, the best Weingarten could do was conclude that Casey had been “fishing in troubled waters” on the hostage issue and was engaged in “informal, clandestine, and potentially dangerous efforts on behalf of the Reagan campaign to gather intelligence on the volatile and unpredictable course of the hostage negotiations.”

The House Probe

Thanks to the Dole filibuster, most of the October Surprise investigation was delivered into the friendlier hands of a House task force, where Republican Rep. Henry Hyde battled the probe from the inside while Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton tried to be as accommodating to George H.W. Bush as possible.

Hamilton even agreed to blackball one Democratic staff investigator because the Republicans didn’t want him involved and because the staffer thought the October Surprise allegations might just be true. The investigator, House Foreign Affairs Committee chief counsel Spencer Oliver, had written a memo questioning another dubious alibi that had been used to “clear” George H.W. Bush of suspicion.

Though the Senate filibuster succeeded in limiting the investigation of how the Reagan-Bush era began, it did not spare George Bush Sr. from defeat in 1992. Amid growing public suspicion that Bush had lied about his claim to be “out of the loop” on the Iran-Contra scandal, Bush lost to Democrat Bill Clinton.

In the weeks after Clinton’s victory, the House October Surprise task force tidied up the history of 1980 by sweeping inconvenient facts under the rug.

In December 1992 and January 1993, new evidence poured into the task force corroborating allegations of Republican complicity in secret contacts with Iran in 1980. But the information was mostly kept from the American people.

There was little incentive for either side to fight for the truth. The Republicans on the House task force wanted to protect the Reagan-Bush legacy and the Democrats no longer saw any political imperative in exposing wrongdoing by George H.W. Bush.

Though the Democrats didn’t understand the significance at the time, their collaboration in the October Surprise cover-up opened the door for a Bush Restoration eight years later. One of George W. Bush’s few credentials for being President was his father’s reputation as an honorable politician.

So the Republican filibuster in 1991 served a crucial political function by undermining an investigation that might have eliminated the electoral viability of the Bush Family.

The Alito Nomination

Now, 15 years later, a back story of George W. Bush’s nomination of right-wing jurist Samuel Alito is that the U.S. Supreme Court could end up being the final arbiter of attempts to investigate wrongdoing by the current President Bush.

With Alito joining reliable pro-Republican votes – Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy – Bush will have an important card up his sleeve should a legal question about the President’s right to keep secrets from Congress or a prosecutor ever wind its way to the high court.

This time, ironically, a Democratic filibuster might be the only way to prevent the Bush family from concealing more chapters of America’s history.

Sens. Tim Johnson (S.D.) and Robert Byrd (W.Va.) -- two Democrats from conservative states -- announced during floor debate that they would vote for Alito. Including Democrat Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, three Democrats now have said they support President Bush's nominee.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R.-Tenn., has scheduled a "cloture" vote for Monday at 4:30 p.m. ET and an up-or-down vote on Alito for Tuesday at 11 a.m. ET. Cloture is a Senate term that refers to a vote to limit debate and proceed to an up-or-down vote. In essence, a vote against cloture is a filibuster.

"I refuse simply to toe the party line when it comes to Supreme Court justices, and I make up my mind after careful contemplation," Byrd said. "... I am a registered Democrat -- everyone knows that. But when it comes to judges, I hail from a conservative state, and like a majority of my constituents, I prefer conservative judges. I've been saying that for years and years. That is, [I prefer] judges who do not try to make the law."

Sen. Arlen Specter, R.-Pa., said behind-the-scenes counts show that Alito has the 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. Two Democrats -- Sen. Ken Salazar of Colorado and Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana -- have said they would oppose any filibuster attempt. Salazar, though, said he would vote against Alito, while Landrieu said she is still examining Alito's record.

Republicans have 55 seats. Assuming that all 55 vote against a filibuster, and that Democrats Johnson, Byrd, Nelson, Salazar and Landrieu do the same, Republicans would have the 60 votes to block any filibuster attempt.

"Because we have such a full plate of pressing issues before Congress, a filibuster at this time would be, in my view, very counterproductive," Landrieu said in a statement. "... We simply cannot afford to bring the Senate to a halt at a time when we need its action the most. If called to vote for cloture on Judge Alito's nomination, I will vote yes."

An unofficial vote tally by C-SPAN showed 54 senators supporting Alito's nomination and 31 opposing it. That is more than enough for confirmation, although it could make for one of the closest Supreme Court confirmation votes in history. But C-SPAN's count didn't include Sen. Susan Collins, R.-Maine, who late Thursday announced her support for Alito. That would increase the number of supporters to 55. Three Republicans -- Lincoln Chafee (R.I.), Olympia Snowe (Maine) and Ted Stevens (Alaska) -- have not announced how they would vote.

Johnson said Alito would not have been his choice for the Supreme Court and that he had some concerns about the jurist, but that presidents deserve "due deference" on their nominees.

"Judge Alito deserves the same deference that Republican senators accorded the Supreme Court nominees of President Clinton. I am mindful that [Supreme Court] Justice [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg, a former counsel to the ACLU, was confirmed with 96 Senate votes in her favor," Johnson said.

"I do not believe that simple political ideology ought to be a deciding factor so long as the nominee's views are not significantly outside the mainstream of American legal thinking. I also believe that the judicial nomination and confirmation process in recent years has become overly politicized to the detriment of the rule of law."

Alito's confirmation would be a monumental victory for Christian conservatives, who have worked for years to reshape the nation's highest court. Paired with Chief Justice John Roberts, Alito's confirmation would give Bush two justices on the Supreme Court in less than a year. Although it is not yet known how either Alito or Roberts will vote on a handful of significant issues, legal observers believe it could make a difference on abortion and religious freedom cases. Alito would replace Sandra Day O'Connor, who in recent years has provided key votes in 5-4 rulings against Ten Commandments displays and bans on partial-birth abortion.

Currently, the Supreme Court is considering whether to take up a case relating to the federal ban on partial-birth abortion -- a gruesome procedure in which an abortion doctor partially delivers a late-term baby feet first. With the baby's head in the birth canal, the doctor then punctures the skull and suctions out the brain.

But if Alito is confirmed, the Supreme Court still would not have the votes to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide. Even without O'Connor, five members are on record as affirming Roe.

Speaking Jan. 25, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R.-Utah, said the battle over Alito and the judiciary is a fight "over whether we should stick with the system America’s founders established."

"Some want to change that system because, frankly, it does not give them everything they want," Hatch said. "Self-government, after all, can be a little messy and sometimes very frustrating. Letting the people and their elected representatives make the law and define the culture means that, on any given day, certain political interests win and others lose.

"Some who lose in the political process pick themselves up and try again another day. Others leave the political process behind and go to the courts, trying to persuade judges to impose upon the American people policies and priorities the people would not choose for themselves."

The Supreme Court, Hatch said, "does not exist to run the country, right all wrongs and usher in peace and domestic tranquility. The judiciary is part of our system of limited government. It is not a system unto itself."

Judge Samuel Alito Jr., whose entire history suggests that he holds extreme views about the expansive powers of the presidency and the limited role of Congress, will almost certainly be a U.S. Supreme Court justice soon. His elevation will come courtesy of a president whose grandiose vision of his own powers threatens to undermine America's basic philosophy of government - and a Senate that seems eager to cooperate by rolling over and playing dead.

It is hard to imagine a moment when it would be more appropriate for senators to fight for a principle. Even a losing battle would draw the American public's attention to the import of this nomination.

At the Judiciary Committee hearings, the judge followed the well-worn path to confirmation, which has the nominee offer up only the most boring statements and unarguable truisms. But in what he has said in the past, and what he refused to say in the hearings, Alito raised warning flags that, in the current political context, cannot simply be shrugged away with a promise to fight again another day.

The Alito nomination has been discussed largely in the context of his opposition to abortion rights, and if the hearings provided any serious insight into the nominee's intentions at all, it was that he has never changed his early convictions on that point.

But portraying the Alito nomination as just another volley in the culture wars vastly underestimates its significance. The judge's record strongly suggests that he is an eager lieutenant in the ranks of the conservative theorists who ignore America's system of checks and balances, elevating the presidency over everything else. He has expressed little enthusiasm for restrictions on presidential power and has espoused the peculiar argument that a president's intent in signing a bill is just as important as the intent of Congress in writing it. This would be worrisome at any time, but it takes on far more significance now, when the Bush administration seems determined to use the cover of the "war on terror" and presidential privilege to ignore every restraint.

There was nothing that Alito said in his hearings that gave any comfort to those who wonder whether the new Roberts court will follow precedent and continue to affirm, for instance, that a man the president labels an "unlawful enemy combatant" has the basic right to challenge the government's ability to hold him in detention forever without explanation. His much-quoted statement that the president is not above the law is meaningless unless he also believes that the law requires the chief executive to defer to Congress and the courts.

Nebraska and California also have deadlines within weeks. Full details below.


NOW, here's what we do next

1) We of course rally every voice we can to speak out our senators demanding that they support a filibuster against the Alito unitary executive agenda. But since many are telling their senators that they will no longer vote for them if they do not support the people's filibuster, we must
ALSO

2) Immediately field primary election challengers against those senators up for election this year who will not protect our Supreme Court from a reactionary takeover. We must pressure those who have already stated they will perversely vote for Alito, Byrd (WV) and Nelson (NE), and also Landrieu (LA) and Feinstein (CA), who may vote "No" but have stated they still oppose a filibuster.

TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE IN WEST VIRGINIA WITH A CANDIDATE FILING DEADLINE OF THIS SATURDAY, JANUARY
28, AT MIDNIGHT. IF YOU KNOW ANYONE INTERESTED IN RUNNING THEY MUST ACT AT ONCE.

Instructions below on how YOU can challenge wayward senators in their own primary elections

THE PRIMARY CHALLENGES

We the people are not kidding. Our senators WILL courageously fight for our rights or we will be done with them. There can be no redemption for failure to stand up against fundamentally altering the balance of our Supreme Court. This applies not just to senators up for reelection this year. The people will remember. Even if they got every other vote correct, we can and must do better, lest we
risk having them betray us in the future at a critical time again.

Especially for WV and NE, if you can get filed in the next day or two, hold a press conference, contact your local media to get as much coverage as you can, and let us know as soon as possible your intentions. For all senate candidates you must be at least 30 years old, and a U.S. citizen for
at least 9 years.

WEST VIRGINIA:

To be a candidate in the WV primary to oppose Robert Byrd you must have a "Certificate of Announcement" (with filing fee) postmarked and in the mail NO LATER than midnight, January 28, 2006, which is THIS SATURDAY! Here is the form which must also be notarized.


There is also a "Candidate Name Pronunciation Form" which appears to be required.

You will then have 10 days from the date of the filing of the Certificate of Announcement to file a "Personal Financial Disclosure." This information was extracted from the following pages to which you should refer.

http://www.wvsos.com/elections/candidates/getreadytorun.htm
http://www.wvsos.com/elections/candidates/filingsteps.htm
http://www.wvsos.com/elections/candidates/calendarfiling.htm
http://www.wvsos.com/elections/candidates/candidateforms.htm

The primary election itself will take place on May 9, 2006.

Senator Byrd says he will not "tow the party line." We'll see if we can inspire him to tow the people's line. Otherwise, you might be the next Democratic senator from West Virginia.

NEBRASKA:

The deadline for filing the notarized "Candidate Filing Form for Partisan Office" is March 1, 2006.
Here is the form.

http://www.sos.state.ne.us/elec/pdf/partisan.pdf

The primary election will be held May 9, 2006. For more information please refer to the following
links:

http://www.sos.state.ne.us/elec/
http://www.sos.state.ne.us/elec/pdf/2006_election_calendar.pdf
http://www.sos.state.ne.us/elec/pdf/candidate_filing_for_federal_office.pdf
http://www.sos.state.ne.us/elec/ele_forms.html

Senator Ben Nelson has a voting record the envy of many of the senators of the other party. Perhaps there are residents of Nebraska who do not feel he is faithfully representing them. If you are one of them, you could be the next Democratic senator from Nebraska.

LOUISIANA:

The Louisiana "Notice of Candidacy (Qualifying Form)" must be filed by August 11, 2006. The filing fee can be waived if you collect 5,000 nominating petition signatures with not less than 500 from each congressional district. This is the form

The primary itself will be held on September 30, 2006. All this information was extracted from the
following pages:

http://www.sec.state.la.us/elections/calendar-2006-elections.htm
http://www.sec.state.la.us/elections/elections-index.htm#cand
http://www.sec.state.la.us/elections/misc/z-bb-fees.pdf
http://www.sec.state.la.us/elections/misc/z-bb-qualifications.pdf

Like Byrd and Nelson, Landrieu was part of the "Gang of 14" that forced the original craven filibuster compromise, which as we see today has gained us absolutely nothing. Is she really the best Louisiana can do? If you are a resident that is your call.

CALIFORNIA:

California is another state with fast approaching deadlines. Although the final deadline for filing as a primary candidate is March 10, 2006, but if you want a candidate statement to appear on the ballot you must submit that by February 14, 2006, and if you want to get the filing fee waived (by submitting 10,000 signatures) that must be done by February 23, 2006.

We could not find a filing form on line, which apparently must be obtained directly from the secretary of state. The primary election will be held on June 6, 2006. For more information please consult the following.

http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/election_2006/2_nom_rqmts.pdf
http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/election_2006/3_cf_all.pdf
http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/candidate_stmts/03_info_cs6606.pdf
http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/elections_calendar2006.htm

Astoundingly, Dianne Feinstein had initially indicated she was leaning toward Alito, and only agreed to vote "No" after much pressure from her mobilized constituents. Recognizing that anything short of a filibuster is in fact a "Yes" vote, there must be even more pressure to get her to REALLY protect a woman's right to privacy, perhaps from a competing candidate if that might be you.

DISCLAIMER

The above was not written by an attorney and does not constitute, nor does it purport to constitute, legal advice. All information was compiled from the publicly available links provided above, which you should verify yourself for accuracy, and then make your own independent judgment about whether to register to run for an office or not.

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed to be ours, and forward this message to everyone else you know.

If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at http://www.usalone.com/in.htm

BuzzFlash's source for this rumor also correctly informed us that after days of BuzzFlash calling upon Senator John Kerry to live up to his 2003 commitment to lead a filibuster against a candidate with the anti-Constitutional background of Sam Alito that Kerry was now trying to get the caucus to back a filibuster. Indeed, late on Thursday, Kerry's office publicly announced what our source had told us: Kerry would indeed try to filibuster Alito and try to persuade his Democratic colleagues to back him by voting to keep the filibuster alive. He will need 40 other votes.

But that brings us back to Obama. We called both his Chicago and D.C. offices to try and ferret out whether Obama's alleged opposition to a filibuster was indeed true, but we could not get an answer. We left a message with his D.C. Press Secretary that we would run with the story if we did not hear back from him -- and we did not hear back from him.

That doesn't mean it's true. But add this to the evidence.

Someone who attended the weekly D.C. town hall breakfast meetings that Obama and Minority Whip Dick Durbin hold for Illinois constituents said that Obama was distinctly non-committal when the subject of a filibuster came up. He didn't offer to support one, and dismissed the notion with "the votes aren't there" sort of approach. This was said on the morning of January 26th.

(In a separate wire service story, "Assistant Democratic Leader Dick Durbin told reporters that he 'can count votes' and concluded that a filibuster of Alito 'would not be likely to succeed.'" Message to Dick: You and Reid are the top two Democrats to make the filibuster happen, not to let everyone run off and do what they want for their own selfish political reasons.)

The Republicans often don't have the votes the day before a big bill comes up, but by the time the dust clears, somehow they find them. That's the job of political parties: to win.

If the rumor is true, the golden future of the Democratic Party has shown himself to be another Dem Senator waving a white flag. It doesn't matter if he votes "No," which he will. He knows that; the Republicans know that; and we all know that.

The Busheviks count their victories; the Dems count their losses and take pride in their "symbolic" votes. The difference is between winners and losers: only, in this case, the Constitution and our democracy are at stake.

If Obama is pulling a DLC strategy out of concern for his political future, he is going to be a lot more harmed by his caution than by standing up for the Constitution.

So, since Obama's office won't tell us if the rumor is true, you can call them bright and early on Friday morning and ask, "Does Senator Obama support a filibuster against the confirmation of Sam Alito in order to save our Constitutional division of powers and our indvidiual liberties?" Maybe they will answer such a question from you. They won't from us.

The telephone number for Senator Obama's D.C. office is 202-224-2854. The telephone number for his Chicago office is 312-886-3506.

If we are wrong about this rumor, the Senator's people know where to reach us. We will be glad to print any comment the Senator might have on whether or not he will back a filibuster.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

A BuzzFlash Afternote: All we can say about the announced support for Alito by our former hero, Robert Byrd, is Et Tu, Robert?

Here is the Senate's most eloquent supporter of the separation of powers backing a Supreme Court nominee who believes in the "Unitary Executive" (Dictatorial) powers of a Republican president. Such a theory is nowhere in the Constitution and in fact is in violation of the explicit balance of powers guaranteed in the Constitution.

All we can say is that even Robert Byrd must have succumbed to cutting a deal that the GOP will not support his opponent in West Virginia in 2006 with anything but minimal funds and backing from the national party.

Nothing else can explain such a betrayal of the Constitution.

The Democrats must filibuster this activist judge, and they must do it with zeal and a public display of passion not seen from the left since FDR, rallying against similar GOP threats to the balance of power, declared in a 1932 campaign speech that "Were it possible to find ... men almost godlike in their ability to hold the scales of justice with an even hand, such a government might be in the interests of the country, but there are none such on our political horizon." Democrats must fight tooth and nail to prevent Prince Alito, of "unitary executive" fame, of ever sitting on the bench and further strengthening the hand of King George and his monarchy.

Look bad? Wanna know what's gonna make the Democrats look bad? Lying down like dead sheep and letting the King's chosen one sail through without a fight. That's what the Democrats should worry about.