Cloture

Ed Whelan at Bench Memos

The Senate has rejected the Davos-inspired filibuster and instead voted by 72 to 25 to invoke cloture on the Alito nomination.

The final vote on confirmation will occur Tuesday at 11:00 a.m. [EST]

Update: per the roll call, Senator Kohl voted for cloture, Senator Feingold against.

Update 2: In Alito, G.O.P. Reaps Harvest Planted in '82, David D. Kirkpatrick in The New York Times

In 1982, the year after Mr. Alito first joined the Reagan administration, that movement was little more than the handful of legal scholars who gathered at Yale for the first meeting of the Federalist Society, a newly formed conservative legal group.

Update 3: Hugh Hewitt looks ahead ... way, way ahead.

Not being in D.C. it is hard to say whether the current set of Special Assistants to the AG, Assistant and Associate Counsels to the President, Deputy Assistant AG's and Deputy General Counsels scattered across the government have the same abilities as the young Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justice Alito did when they were toiling away in the Reagan-era '80s, but it will part of President Bush's legacy if the nominees of 2025 turned out to have begun their careers in the turbulent legal times of the Bush Adminsitration.

I hope the president and his senior staff are restocking the bench.