Now that Republicans are set to become the minority in the Senate, they are arguing over what this means for outgoing chairmen who have about 19 months left on the six-year term limit for chairmanships established in 1996.

Some senators think the rule means they can serve up to six years as the ranking (minority) member of a panel and then return to fill the unused portion of the chairmanship, Roll Call reports. Others think the rule means no more than six years total as either chairman or ranking member.

“How the issue is resolved will have a ripple effect throughout the powerful committees in the Senate, potentially replacing some of the most colorful personalities in the chamber with more junior senators and some veterans who have been waiting in the wings for years,” reporter Paul Kane writes.

Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran, who had been in line to replace Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens as chairman of the Appropriations Committee in 2003, told the newspaper: “It’s something the Republican Conference will have to deal with.”

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‘Alien’ returns

Now that the Democrats are taking control of the Senate, Hillary Rodham Clinton “returns to a position of real power,” Peggy Noonan writes.

“You lock the door and she comes in the window, you lock the window and she comes up the floor boards. This is like ‘Alien’ — she lives in Tom Daschle’s stomach. Just as the music gets soft and the scene winds down you hear the wild ‘Eeek! Eeek!’ and she bursts out of Tom and darts through the room,”Noonan said in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal.

“Mrs. Clinton signaled her new aggression within hours of Jeffords’ announcement. When the Senate, on Thursday, overwhelmingly confirmed Viet Dinh and Michael Chertoff as assistant attorneys general, Mrs. Clinton cast the only vote against either man.”

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Energetic criticism

President Bush’s energy plan, already under fire from Democrats and environmentalists, is dismissed by National Review, the conservative magazine, as so much political posturing.

“The hyperbolic attacks on the Bush plan by environmentalists (as an attempt to poison the air and kill the caribou) shouldn’t trick conservatives into an exaggerated sense of its merit,” the magazine says in an editorial in its current issue.

“The basic thrust of the administration’s thinking on energy is sound: a growing economy requires more energy, which in turn entails more production.

But the Bush plan itself is a political document, meant to placate corporate interests, environmentalists, and everyone in between, and so is festooned with an embarrassment of subsidies and incentives that will, at best, prove an irrelevance.

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Wrong on both counts

“The buzz in the media after Sen. James Jeffords’ switch put Democrats in control of the Senate was that President Bush must change his ways. He has to become more moderate. Why? Because only that will prevent more Republican defections and it´s the president’s one hope for getting his agenda through Congress. This is wrong on both counts,” Fred Barnes writes in the Weekly Standard.

“Bush and GOP congressional leaders bent over backward to accommodate Jeffords and liberal Democrats on education, the senator’s top priority. Jeffords bolted anyway,” Barnes said.

“The truth about the impact of Jeffords’ move is that no political earthquake has occurred. The Senate is ideologically unchanged. The swing votes in the Senate, are important, but they already were. There’s no clear path to victory for the Bush agenda, after taxes and education, but that was always true. To pass a patients’ bill of rights, a prescription-drug benefit, or missile defense, a bipartisan coalition of some sort will be essential.”

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The lonely Vermonter

“In the final analysis, Jeffords was out of step with his party, making his departure appropriate, if politically inconvenient. Those who argue that it was the party out of step with Jeffords, some political analysts are saying, are those who wish the Republicans no good.” UPI political analyst Peter Roff writes.

“The conservative, low-tax, minimal-government Republican Party enjoys national parity with the Democrats, something the Northeastern liberal GOP could not achieve.

“Jeffords is, in that regard, these observers say, out of step with victory. One GOP consultant went so far as to say, ‘If the Republicans were doing better in New England, Jeffords would not have been so lonely. Why is it that the people from states where the GOP usually doesn’t win think they can tell the rest of us how to run the party and what we all should believe? It doesn’t make sense.’”