Just talked to someone familiar with the Senate who is following the Bolton stuff closely. Says that vote counts earlier in the week showed a majority for Bolton. But they will have to be re-checked in light of the committee action. He thinks Frist still hasn’t decided when to schedule the vote. A deal has been worked out to vote on the highway bill (a/k/a veto bait) on Tuesday. It’s possible that Bolton could be squeezed in there early/mid-week as well. But Frist will probably want to hear from other senators over the weekend and the decision probably won’t be made until Monday at the earliest.
On judges, he says Frist is close enough to 50 to make everyone nervous–Republicans because he might not be there, Democrats because he might be there. He expects possible deals to be floated with even more intensity and points out that Frist, through his compromise proposal, has established 100 hours of debate as the standard for each of these judges. So even if he brings up one of the targeted judges, debate could drag on for as long as two weeks before there’s an attempt to cut it off and “go nuclear.”