Brain Fertilizer

Pick any site that even just occasionally does political blogging and you can probably find excellent round-ups. So I won't do one here.

Bottom line: Three nominees are going to get up-or-down votes. That's three more than were getting that chance 2 days ago.
Furthermore, the wording is sufficiently vague that there is little to no agreement by Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, liberals, or libertarians as to what will actually happen regarding the other four, and regarding any future Supreme Court nominees.

Musing: I still don't like the filibuster in general. The minority party already had its chance in the general election to win enough seats to gain the majority. Failing that, they can use deals and pressure to win defectors from the majority party to prevent the majority from winning. The minority party can even bottle legislation/nominees up in committee. There is no need for a fake filibuster in which no debate actually occurs. I can see where this might be necessary and/or useful back in the days when Senators were appointed by state legislatures...this is probably just another reason we should go back to that.

Interesting point: all that aside, I still consider the way this played out confirms that Sen. Frist is too weak to be Senate Majority leader, and I still consider Sen. McCain to be a faithless legislature who honors his Republican principles only in the breach. As such, I really hope a strong candidate mounts a strong challenge for his seat the next time he's up for re-election.