The last sentence was wrong. They never planned to vote on Tuesday -- never, ever!
Since you brought up the article, here are the first paragraphs with my comments:
WASHINGTON — History was made in the U.S. Senate Thursday, but it wasn't the kind that Republicans or the Bush administration wanted to confront. (That is an outright lie! History was not made in the Senate Wednesday night!)
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist decided to call a procedural vote to break a Democratic filibuster against U.S. Court of Appeals nominee Miguel Estrada. The filibuster against a judicial candidate was historical in itself. (The procedural vote was a quorum call only to bring Senators to the floor and was not a vote to end a filibuster -- if Garrett had bothered to watch the proceedings he would have known that)
The decision to call for a "cloture" vote on an appellate court nominee overturned more than two centuries of Senate precedent and rewrote the constitutional definition of "advise and consent." Never before has a nominee been caught this deep in the web of Senate politics. (The bolded part is a lie! There was no "cloture" vote" on Wednesday night! To put that in the beginning of the article was a lie! Don't know what else to call it except if you want to be kind, you can call it bad reporting!)
Now that is just the first paragraphs of the article and anyone reading can see that was not a TRIAL BALLOON. Maybe Senator Frist better think twice about talking to Major Garrett in the future!
And the quote from Frist in that story says that he is determined to get Estrada confirmed whether it takes days, weeks or months.