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Senate Sausage [Kathryn Jean Lopez] Brian Darling, director of Senate relations at the Heritage Foundation, e-mails: Someone once said not to watch how sausage or legislation are made. Today especially I prefer to be at the sausage factory. As if the Senate floor situation could get any worse, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's staff is now rewriting the Clay Pigeon amendment behind closed doors. It is the intent of the Majority Leader to bring this new unread Amendment up without the Republicans seeing the language. Yesterday Senator Reid did not have his massive 373 page amendment ready when he started...

The National Review has posted the "Clay Pigeon" amendment(s). Happy reading.

Pajamas Media has learned that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid may be using an “unprecedented combination of legislative procedures” to push through the controversial Kennedy Immigration Bill - today! In fact, it may already be in progress by the time you read this. ...Rocketing through Republican Washington is a memo predicting Sen. Harry Reid will use a unprecedented combination of legislative procedures to shove through the immigration bill today—without real opposition... ...[former Secretary for the Majority and Minority in the U.S. Senate, Elizabeth B. Letchworth] calls it “The Reid scenario," which she says will kick off in less than two...

Senate will reconvene at 2:30pm to argue cloture. CSPAN indicates that Sen. Reid will use a "little known procedure known as the 'clay pidgeon rule'" to limit the number of amendments to as few as one.

Yesterday, a GOP aide, who is one of my sources in the Senate, gave me the rundown on what's currently happening with the Senate immigration bill (You can see my two previous reports from this source here and here). To begin with, the key thing to keep in mind about the upcoming vote on the Senate immigration bill is that the pro-amnesty forces have two key cloture votes that they have to win. The first is the vote on the so-called "clay pigeon" strategy. What this does is take the original bill and all of its amendments and reintroduce it...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Only in the arcane world of the U.S. Senate could a quirky gambit known as a "clay pigeon" make the difference between passage of an important immigration measure and its death at the hands of opponents. Democratic leaders hope the complex manoeuvre, which makes use of the Senate's labyrinthine rules to insist on votes on amendments, will frustrate conservatives' attempts to derail the embattled immigration bill, instead putting it on a fast track to passage next week. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said he would revive the bill to legalize as many as 12 million unlawful immigrants...

House Dems May Break Up Immigration Bill The immigration bill is back, with the Senate expected to debate it over the next two weeks. Senate passage is by no means assured, but the measure appears to have a fighting chance of surviving the legislative maneuvers and counter-maneuvers expected of the next couple of weeks. Keen observers of the current debate, however, have long expressed reservations about the chance of anything close to the Senate "grand bargain" (the bipartisan legislation including both border security measures and a "path to citizenship") making it through the House. In the House, Republicans seem firmly...

WHAT DOES HARRY REID HAVE TO DO WITH CLAY PIGEONS? Well, besides the obvious ... but a clay pigeon is a tactic used in Congress. Harry Reid wants to use this on the immigration bill to get it passed as quickly as possible. This is so he can move onto more important things, like undermining our military and maintaining his less-popular-than-Bush image. The "clay pigeon" tactic calls for all 22 amendments to the amnesty bill to be incorporated into one amendment .. just one amendment containing all 22 elements. That's the clay pigeon. The pigeon is then launched and the...

WASHINGTON -- Only in the arcane world of the U.S. Senate could a quirky gambit known as a "clay pigeon" make the difference between passage of an important immigration measure and its death at the hands of opponents. Democratic leaders hope the complex maneuver _ which makes use of the Senate's labyrinthine rules to insist on votes on amendments _ will frustrate conservatives' attempts to derail the embattled immigration bill, instead putting it on a fast track to passage next week. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he would revive the bill to legalize as many as 12 million unlawful...