Republican leader Mitch McConnell played another game of Lucy and the Football, with Harry Reid playing the role of Charlie Brown.  Early this week, Harry Reid wanted to bring up, for approaching the 70th time since he's become majority leader of the Senate, another couple of bills authored by Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold that would require immediate steps to withdraw our troops from Iraq.

Reid had figured that he would bring them up for consideration, that McConnell would immediately rally the Republicans to defeat the bill's 60 vote requirement to proceed to open floor debate, and then go out and hold a press conference before moving onto something else.  McConnell, toying with Reid as he's done since the Democrats took the majority in January '07, didn't knock the bills down, allowing them to proceed to the floor for debate, throwing the feckless Reid into a scheduling disaster.

...

They weren't planning on spending any serious Senate floor time on this issue, but now they had to scramble and start scheduling Senators to come to the floor and rehash the same old tired rhetoric about how disastrous the war in Iraq is, an even harder argument to make when the situation all over Iraq is better than it was two months ago, the last time the Democrats tried to declare defeat.  And two months ago, the situation had significantly improved as well. 

After a couple of days of on and off debate, and very little else going on, Reid began to see the writing on the wall, meaning he wasn't going to get anywhere near the 60 votes he needed to cut off debate and proceed to final votes on Feingold's bills.  So he withdrew them from consideration, and vowed he would live to try and surrender another day, probably in a month when the next war appropriation bills come up.  

And from Ben Pershing at the Washington Post (read the entire blog post here):

When the week began, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's (D-Nev.) goal was to hold preliminary test votes on two Iraq bills sponsored by antiwar Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), and then quickly move on to a housing foreclosure bill when the Senate failed to invoke cloture on the Iraq bills.

Reid and most fellow Democrats actually didn't really want to deal with Feingold's Iraq measures, one of which would cut off most funds for the war 120 days after enactment, while the other would require President Bush to produce a comprehensive report on fighting al-Qaeda. The first bill was particularly controversial, but it also seemed doomed to defeat, as similar measures have repeatedly failed by overwhelming margins to get the 60 votes necessary to invoke cloture and begin debate on final passage. Reid had told Feingold he would get a chance to bring up his bills, and Democrats figured it wouldn't take long to dispose of them and move on to housing.

But things didn't go as planned. After some GOP leadership strategy sessions Tuesday, McConnell instructed Republicans to vote in favor of cloture so they could have a full-fledged debate on the Iraq funding bill. The tactic worked, as the Senate voted 70-24 in favor of cloture with 43 of the chamber's 46 Republicans voting "aye." Then 42 Republicans joined 45 Democrats in voting to proceed with debate on the second bill.

McConnell's aim was two-fold. First, he wanted to mess with Reid's plans and delay his bringing up the housing bill. Second, Republicans wanted to use the debate to highlight what they see as measurable progress, at least on the military front, in Iraq. The result was that Iraq got plenty of news coverage this week it wouldn't otherwise have gotten, and Democrats were put in the unusual position of accusing the GOP of stalling tactics for wanting to debate a bill the Democrats themselves had put on the calendar. After two days of debate, Reid ended up pulling both bills without a final vote.

...The nondescript McConnell's efforts to frustrate Reid's plans were especially worthy of attention -- and the Player of the Week award.