Alas:

Amid the backdrop of soaring oil and gasoline prices, a sharply divided Senate on Wednesday voted to open the ecologically rich Alaska wildlife refuge to oil drilling, delivering a major energy policy win for President Bush (news - web sites).

The Senate, by a 51-49 vote, rejected an attempt by Democrats and GOP moderates to remove a refuge drilling provision from next year's budget, preventing opponents from using a filibuster — a tactic that has blocked repeated past attempts to open the Alaska refuge to oil companies.

... not completely over yet, as the Times explains:

For drilling to take place, the Senate will later have to pass a measure explicitly authorizing the opening of the wildlife refuge to drilling, something that until now has been prohibited. Then the House of Representatives would have to explicitly authorize drilling as well.

UPDATE: Steve Soto has an interesting theory on why Hawaii's two Senators voted to drill.

The good folks at Centerfield are mildly chuffed exasperated that Congress is wasting its and everyone else's time with steroids in baseball. Perhaps this kind of cowpie, along with the increasingly obvious and odious stench of corruption emanating from chez Bugman, is why only 37% of the American people think highly of the job Congress is doing. Actually, I'm surprised the number isn't lower.

Unlike the nice moderates at Centerfield, I'm a partisan, so let's be perfectly clear about this: the GOP is in firm control of Congress, and it's almost completely their fault that Congress sucks.

nadezhda corrects my faux-British in comments below. lorry, lift, whatever.

For those of you interested in the Senate hearings on the legislation to update the FOIA being sponsored by Sens Cornyn and Leahy, they begin at 10:00AM EST today (Tuesday March 15) and can be heard via streaming audio at the CapitolHearings.org site that CSPAN runs for Senate hearings. Just scroll down to Judiciary -- Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security Subcommittee.

A highly unusual moment of insight from Dick Morris:

So why did the GOP not deliver the mortal blow when they could have easily done so? My guess is that the White House stopped them from doing so. Bush and Rove must have sent signals to lay off the cloture rule. Only an intervention of that order of magnitude would have been sufficiently effective to vitiate the carefully laid plans of the Republican majority.

But if the administration did intervene and stop the emasculation of the filibuster on judicial nominations, why did it do so? Why would the president voluntarily make it easier for Democrats to torpedo his judicial nominations?

President Bush and Karl Rove probably figured that they did not want the power to appoint judges without opposition from the Senate Democrats. They realized that without the filibuster there was nothing to stop them from nominating judges who would cling to a hard right-wing agenda on Roe v. Wade and other issues, permanently alienating much of the country and driving a stake into GOP efforts to reach out to independents and women.

Bush needs the filibuster so that he can nominate judges who will not drive a wedge into the politics of America. He needs an excuse to tell his far-right friends why he is not naming a new Clarence Thomas or William Rehnquist or Antonin Scalia to the court. Bush grasps that such an appointment would be a step that would shatter the unity he is achieving after his reelection. And he needs the filibuster to keep the loyalty of his base even as he disappoints their most earnest expectations.

Bush might submit a nominee who would trigger a filibuster when the Supreme Court vacancy comes. He might then be forced to name a more moderate alternative. Or he might circumvent the process entirely and name a nominee acceptable to all, as Bill Clinton did. But, in any case, Bush needs the filibuster. That’s why it is still on the rulebooks.

Right ... so worried about unity, that W. In any case, he's probably right about the Lucy holding a football strategy at work here.

UPDATE: James Joyner thinks Bush is a "true believer" who would like nothing better than to nominate another Scalia type. Actually, I think Scalia compares favorably to the latest crop of extremist nominees. There is one point to be made, in any case: Bush has pretty consistently pushed a maximalist, no-compromise negotiating strategy on judicial appointments, and gotten his way on the vast majority without having to resort to the "nuclear option." That's always his style, because he doesn't negotiate with himself. Or something.