Is it weird that I'm happy about this news? The progressive blogosphere will have Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) -- he of the lunchtime slide shows on STDs and the decent Elton John impression -- to kick around on the Judiciary Committee.

Earlier this week I mentioned the committee crunch that could have ejected Coburn from the powerful Judiciary panel. But Coburn just confirmed to me that fellow pro-lifer Sen. San Brownback (R-KS), who is readying a likely gubernatorial run in 2010, has agreed to step aside from Judiciary so the Oklahoma senator can stay.

Senators are politicians, after all, so it's not surprising that they love their schmoozing time. Today was no exception, as the vote to release bailout money to the president-elect became a veritable smorgasboard of senatorial socializing.

New Sen. Roland Burris (D-IL) was welcomed heartily by members of both parties on his first day as an official member. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) pointed happily to Burris' new senatorial pin (which they wear on their lapels during every session day) and playfully brushed the shoulder of his dark suit. Burris voted to give his senatorial predecessor, Barack Obama, $350 billion of bailout authority.

North Carolina's ideologically disparate senators, newcomer Kay Hagan (D) and Richard Burr (R), huddled together on the Democratic side, while Vice President-elect Joe Biden (D-DE), Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), and Sen. Ken Salazar (D-CO) accepted valedictories for what could be their last vote before joining the Obama Cabinet.

The Senate just voted down a resolution that would have prevented Barack Obama from tapping the remaining $350 billion of the financial bailout. The final vote was 42-52, and there were vote-switchers galore since the chamber last agreed to give a boatload of cash to George Bush's Treasury Department.

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From a release that just hit my inbox:

[Sen. David] Vitter [R-LA] has authored the disapproval resolution that would block Congress's ability to release the remainder of the TARP funds.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's (D-NV) office released the final breakdown of ratios on committees last night, and what sounds like a dry piece of non-news is actually a serious win for Democrats.

After some questions about whether the undecided Minnesota race would leave committee organizing in limbo, Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) have settled on a three-vote advantage for Democrats on every Senate committee except Appropriations and Armed Services -- on those panels, Democrats will have four more members.

This means that every time an even mildly contentious bill comes up to a vote -- or a mildly contentious nominee, for that matter -- Democrats can afford to lose one centrist member to the Republicans and still get a win.

The tax-writing Finance Committee and the purse-controlling Appropriations panel are already filled to capacity with Democrats. The new appropriators are Sens. Jon Tester (D-MT) and Mark Pryor (D-AR), while Sens. Thomas Carper (D-DE), Robert Menendez (D-NJ), and Bill Nelson (D-FL) will get their crack at the tax code on Finance.

The Senate Finance Committee just released a memo detailing the two gaffes that are causing a media storm today over Treasury secretary-designate Tim Geithner.

According to the committtee's inquiry, Geithner recently filed five years of amended tax returns, taking care of self-employment tax bills that it appears he had mistakenly not paid while working abroad for the International Monetary Fund. He ended up paying the bills, with interest, at a cost of $31,536 $43,200. About $26,000 of that total was paid to settle tax bills from 2001 and 2002 after Geithner was nominated by Barack Obama last month.

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Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), another senior member of the Senate Finance Committee, just shed some more light on green-energy incentives that could be added to the coming stimulus bill. Stabenow says she's talking with the Obama camp about fully funding the green-collar jobs plan she got (non-bindingly) inserted into last year's budget resolution.

Stabenow already has an impressive 32 fellow Democrats on board with her plan, although the language setting it out the budget resolution is head-scratchingly vague -- a typical feature of the symbolic "reserve funds" that many senators add to budget resolutions with little hope of the provision actually turning into law. Here's the green-collar jobs language, from the final budget:

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Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the No. 3-ranked Senate leader, just told reporters that Obama economic adviser Larry Summers had his third stimulus meeting with Dems in six days -- this one solely with members of the Finance Committee, which will have first crack at the massive legislation.

Schumer was unsurprisingly effusive in his praise for the Obama team's engagement with lawmakers. When I asked about the progress of energy tax benefits reportedly getting added to the stimulus, however, he made a bit of news. "You'll find a mixture" of existing and new alternative energy benefits in the economic recovery plan, Schumer said. The overall amount of tax credits in the bill, he added, are expected to remain at around $300 billion.

John Kerry (D-MA), like Schumer a senior member on Finance, was more specific. He said senators are talking about a "green lending" proposal to direct loans to worthy alternative energy projects -- perhaps along the lines of Reps. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Zach Wamp's (R-TN) plan to set up "green banks."

Kerry predicted a "significant energy component" in the final stimulus, "literally as much [funding] as I can get." In fact, he's inside the Democratic caucus meeting right now making a presentation on creative energy tax proposals.

As I mentioned earlier this morning, Tuesday lunches in the Senate are always a scene -- except when a president-elect comes to visit. Then they become a total madhouse.

The shoving scrum of reporters and cameramen aside, the Senate's mood was palpable. Remember that trust game, so popular at summer camp and workplace bonding events, where one blindfolded person had to fall backwards into a line of outstretched hands from his compatriots? Democratic senators and Obama are playing it now.

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The president-elect is headed to the weekly Senate Democratic lunch meeting today to make his case for a release of the second half of the financial bailout money. It sounds like news -- after all, as the AP reports, Barack Obama is "putting his persuasion skills to a high-stakes test" with today's visit. But what makes the lunch date in itself significant? Here's my take.

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In the airy, expansive room known as 216 Hart Senate Office Building, the site of many highly anticipated and attended congressional events, Hillary Clinton is in the midst of her confirmation hearing to become Barack Obama's secretary of state.

Clinton is as close as Washington comes to a shoo-in, but that doesn't mean her testimony is without genuine drama. Conservative Republicans on the Foreign Relations Committee -- particularly Sens. Bob Corker (TN), David Vitter (LA) and Jim DeMint (SC)-- are determined to give her as rough a ride as they can, which means plenty of questions about foreign donors to Bill Clinton's presidential library and foundation.

Meanwhile, the media is still casting panel chairman John Kerry (D-MA) in the beleaguered second-fiddle role he assumed after the 2004 election, citing his dashed hopes to head Obama's state department as a possible indication of confirmation tensions.

But beneath the surface maneuverings, Clinton's nomination to State is one of those storied transitions that members of Congress -- no matter their party -- love to guide to fruition. The hearing is packed with members of Clinton's family and has already inspired a look back to Kerry's famous "Winter Soldier" testimony on Vietnam before the foreign relations panel 38 years ago.

When the curtain falls on Clinton's appearance today, the TV cameras and pack of reporters will disperse to the next confirmation event -- one hopes they'll continue talking about the issues that are raised while the microphones are on.

To Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), health care reform is the great "unrequited love" of progressives. "It goes back to Harry Truman," he told me during a sit-down interview today. "Every 15 years or so, there's an effort to fix health care. Every time, progressives have said, 'This is the moment, my dream of universal health care will be achieved!' ... Something goes wrong, and it goes by the boards."

His realistic assessment of health care's progress during the past half-century made his prediction for 2009 all the more remarkable: Wyden believes there is "a real path to 65 to 70 votes" in the Senate for a health bill that gives all Americans access to "good-quality, affordable coverage".

In fact, he added, major health reform could receive a vote in Congress by the summer. So is it really time for progressives to start believing in love again? Or should we heed Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA), another influential lawmaker on health care, when he says health care should wait until next year?

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Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) knows how to build health care coalitions. From his seat on the Senate Finance Committee, he has watched the major health debates of the past decade -- from the 1994 Clinton flame-out onwards -- play out from the front row. His Healthy Americans Act helped lay the groundwork for Barack Obama's post-partisan movement on health reform by getting conservatives, progressives, and corporate interests together on a proposal to break the mold of traditional insurance. So he's got a pretty authoritative take on the health care proposals that are headed for inclusion in the stimulus bill.

"If there can be two good wins on health care early," he told me during a sit-down interview in his office today, "on SCHIP and COBRA for the uninsured, it's a bit of a down payment in terms of broader reform. It can build on that -- on Democrats and Republicans finding common ground."

Wyden added that reforming health information technology, allowing all Americans to have an electronic medical record within five years, is also on track to be part of the stimulus, for one simple reason: "It's a job creator."

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Word in the Senate is that Roland Burris' future may be decided today. His legal team has been huddling this afternoon with the Secretary of the Senate -- whose offices, for better or for worse, are next-door to the press gallery. No questions have been taken from the press so far, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) may be pushed to make it official with the would-be senator from Illinois as soon as he finishes meeting with Mexico's President Felipe Calderon.

In response to Friday's post on the political dynamic shaping up in the House over the economic recovery plan, I thought it would help to take a similar look at the Senate. What are the Democratic fault lines that will help determine the cost and the contents of the stimulus bill as the push-and-pull over the package continues?

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Any progressives who have felt bile rise in their throats during previous public struggles of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) will likely get a kick out of this post on the conservative blog Red State, in which Eric Erickson proves quasi-eloquently that the right has as many problems with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) as the left has with Reid.

But No. 4 on Erickson's list of complaints about McConnell is the most interesting: is the Republican leader really "not fighting Reid on throwing [Sen. Tom] Coburn off the Judicial [sic] Committee"?

There would be ample cause for Reid to try to punish Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican who makes a habit of gumming up the Senate works to slow down what he deems excessive government spending. Coburn's quests to delay routine bills -- last year the number topped 100 -- tend to be lonely, but his efforts on the Judiciary Committee have made him a conservative darling.

So it would be a major story if, as The Hill reported last week, Reid tried to cut the number of seats on the judiciary panel in an effort to knock off Coburn. But that's not the case.

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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has written to the Smithsonian raising questions about the caption that sits beneath its new portrait of George W. Bush. The current wording of the caption states that Bush's term was marked by "the attacks on September 11, 2001, that led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq." Sanders, bless his heart, points out that the 9/11 attacks -- all together, now -- had nothing to do with the Iraq war.

From Sanders' letter to Martin Sullivan, director of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington:

When President Bush and Vice President Cheney misled our country into the war in Iraq, they certainly cited the attacks on September 11, along with the equally specious claim that Iraq possessed vast arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. The notion, however, that 9/11 and Iraq were linked, or that one "led to" the other, has been widely and authoritatively debunked ... Might I suggest that a reconsideration of the explanatory text next to the portrait of President Bush is in order[?]

If any readers happen to stop by the Portrait Gallery this month and see a new caption, please let us know.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) had few good things to say about the emerging Obama economic stimulus plan this evening, but the Senate's Democratic chairman, Chuck Schumer (NY), followed Bing Crosby's advice and accentuated the positive.

"What people are debating is the balance" between the parts of the package already outlined by Obama, he said, pointing to widespread Senate support for adding more tax benefits for sustainable and alternative energy. "But I think the basic outline the president-elect put forward is meeting with favor."

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Democratic senators are still emerging from their closed-door briefing with Obama economic adviser Larry Summers ... but a senior Democratic senator, Iowa progressive Tom Harkin, just gave me a dire buzzword: trickle-down.

"There's only one thing we've got to do in this stimulus, and that's create jobs," Harkin told me. "I'm a little concerned by the way Mr. Summers and others are going on this ... it still looks a little more to me like trickle-down."

Likening Barack Obama's economic recovery plan to the failed supply-side excesses of the Reagan and Bush years is a bit of a Cassandra moment. But Harkin didn't back down. "What I'm hearing from Mr. Summers is that they've got a different approach -- tax breaks, and this and that," he said. Harkin warned that, much like the outcome of George Bush's $600 stimulus package last year, recipients of quick tax cuts "are going to be salting it away, not spending it."

When I asked if he felt his concerns were heard during the meeting, he looked to the floor and slowly shook his head. It was almost forlorn.

As the president-elect prepares to expand upon his economic recovery proposal today, it's worth digging deeper into one of the business tax cuts that's said to be a done deal for the package.

Its name is not often used in press coverage -- it's described as "a measure that would allow companies to deduct large portions of recent losses" from their taxes by the Post -- but its full name is the "net operating loss carryback". And it's a pretty nice score for the housing industry from the Obama team.

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As a Capitol Hill source just pointed out, Sen. Dianne Feinstein's quick turnaround on Leon Panetta caps a downright bizarre turn of events:

So let me get this straight:

--Feinstein expresses strong reservations about Panetta (for a variety of reasons)
--Feinstein talks with Obama
--Feinstein slightly walks back on Panetta
--Feinstein talks with Panetta
--Feinstein supports Panetta

This is a profile in courage how exactly?

And we haven't even heard the complaints from Senate intelligence committee Republicans ... yet.

Via AP, we see that incoming Senate intelligence chairman Dianne Feinstein is now supportive of Leon Panetta's nomination to head the CIA.

Seems that Panetta called Feinstein last night and she is "confident he'd surround himself with good personnel" at the agency, as AP reports. Sounds like an indirect agreement that current CIA No. 2 Stephen Kappes will remain at the agency.

That's one Democratic schism resolved for the week; one more to go...

Just talked with Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) as he left the Democratic caucus luncheon (right behind Sen. Hillary Clinton, who smiled and waved but didn't stop for questions). He said the Obama transition team thanked him for his positive remarks on the Leon Panetta CIA nomination yesterday -- words that helped smooth a growing political tussle over the pick -- and asked him to keep saying good things.

Feingold did just that. When I asked if Panetta's lack of strict CIA operational experience could prove a hindrance, he said: "Leon Panetta has more experience than anybody I know in terms of interfacing with people who have that kind of experience."

I asked if he would support keeping current CIA No. 2 Steven Kappes on at the agency, as Dianne Feinstein would prefer (and the Obama transition has agreed to).

"I haven't decided that," Feingold said, "but it's something that may not be my decision -- but it may be a good combination."