When we last left you yesterday, several senate clerks -- caught up in the crossfire of politics at its worst -- were in the middle of reading a 490-page Lieberman-Warner climate change bill amendment to an empty senate chamber.

When they finally finished at 9 p.m., more than eight hours after starting, not only had C-SPAN2 lost its entire viewing audience, but Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was one very unhappy majority leader.

His anger could be described as two-fold. First, Republican leaders admitted that the decision to make the clerks read Sen. Barbara Boxer's substitute amendment aloud had nothing to do better understanding the climate change bill (the reason given at the time), but was instead Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's way of getting back at the Democrats for holding up several judicial nominations.

Second, during the nine-hour intermission, a confidential Republican lobbyist memo fell into the hands of both E&E News (subscription required) and Reid himself. The e-mailed memo lays out the GOP's Lieberman-Warner strategy, essentially telling senators to do everything they can to obstruct and delay the bill.

You can read the entire memo here, but here's our favorite line: "The goal is for a theme (e.g. climate bill - higher gas prices) each day, and the focus is much more on making political points than in amending the bill, changing the baseline text for any future debate, or affecting policy."

At about 11 p.m., Reid read the entire memo to a mostly-empty chamber, noting that "you could not make up anything more cynical." Reid followed that up by trying to limit the number of amendments to the bill, but GOPers protested that he did not have quorum. That prompted Reid to hold a vote on whether to have the Senate sergeant-at-arms go knock on doors and wake up members.

It took over an hour, but Republicans defeated that motion 28-27. That, of course, gave Reid the quorum he needed to vote on his original motion, though by this time it was well past midnight. As the AP reported, "Sen. David Vitter, R-La., in T-shirt and shorts, signaled his vote through an opening of a Senate chamber door." (There's a good joke somewhere in that line.)

To make a long story short, Democratic leaders have moved to end all debate by tomorrow, when we could see a vote.