The old boy at the Lions Club asked, “Isn’t this mostly about John McCain sticking it to Bill Frist?”

Positioned as I am outside McCain’s mind and heart, I could not say.

McCain is an incurable maverick and an old disciple of Bob Dole who has long championed Senate traditions. But that he reportedly dislikes Frist and is a potential rival of the Senate majority leader for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 – maybe that would turn up near the surface if you did an excavation of McCain’s motivation.

I’m wondering, though, just what tactical good McCain did himself in a Republican presidential primary by siding last week with six other Republicans and seven Democrats to save the Democrats’ filibuster option for judicial nominees.

Maybe he’d written off the Religious Right already. Maybe he should have.

Any alliance of 14 U.S. senators risks an unholy element. But for the most part, the seven Republicans and seven Democrats who banded to avert total dysfunction in the Senate represented traditionalists like Robert Byrd and John Warner and unconventional partisans who could afford to disregard their parties’ dogma and remain ingratiated with the voters back home.

You had Maine Republicans like Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, who aren’t all that Republican in the first place. Then you had a Nebraska Democrat like Ben Nelson and an Arkansas Democrat like Mark Pryor, who aren’t all that Democratic in the first place.

Motivations and conveniences aside, the 14 acted nobly. They maneuvered independently of the safe partisan track and agreed to give a little, get a little and trust each other. By sticking together, they deny both a Republican majority and a sufficient Democratic contingent to impose a filibuster.

Naturally, Washington insiders and others have laughed off the trust thing – the mushy compact to avoid filibusters unless “extraordinary circumstances” arise.

All this will evaporate, critics say, as soon as a vacancy arises on the U.S. Supreme Court. That would be the ultimate stakes battle, and it could begin in a month or so if Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who is ill, retires.

Two factors could keep the Gang of 14 intact. Only one of them is within the gang’s control.

If these senators indeed keep their word to reassemble for discussions and potential renegotiations if anybody among them gets an idea that an “extraordinary circumstance” is percolating, dissolution might be headed off.

Otherwise, though, it’s up to President Bush – whether he, though not a party to the Gang of 14’s agreement, will choose to abide by the part that presumes to engage him.

This is that part: The 14 senators said that Bush had not been following the constitutional mandate that he seek senators’ “advice and consent” on judicial nominees. They said he’d been trying to force nominees down their throats, offering them only the option to consent or not. They asked that the administration “advise” them of potential nominees beforehand, so that problems could be pre-empted.

It’s not a particularly unusual request. Stephen Breyer wasn’t Bill Clinton’s first choice for a Supreme Court vacancy. But he was the one nominated after Orrin Hatch, the Republican senator from Utah and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Breyer was the prospect Clinton had in mind who would most likely be confirmed.

We can only wait to see what Bush will do. Will he, in a new spirit of bipartisanship, discuss potential nominees with these 14 senators? Or will he follow his pattern of playing to his grandstand and saying to heck with them?



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John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of “High Wire,” a book about Bill Clinton’s first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.