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One day next week, perhaps Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will propose passage of a motion to proceed to consideration of his health care reform bill.

That would mean only that senators could start arguing and proposing amendments. Republicans will have many amendments, believe me. None will stand a chance of passage, but several will be designed to force Democrats to cast votes they'd rather not cast.

The purpose of such an exercise is to gin-up campaign fodder. It's just that cynical, but you knew that already.

The really meaningful policy moment would come six or eight weeks later, probably, on a motion to end debate, or invoke cloture on the filibuster, as they say in the trade. At that time all Republicans, along with independent Joe Lieberman and maybe our own embattled centrist Blanche Lincoln, would vote against ending debate.

That would mean the matter could not be brought to a vote, since the motion to end the filibuster requires 60 votes that are unattainable against an alliance of all 40 Republicans plus Lieberman and maybe Lincoln and perhaps two other Democrats.

We might not even get to that point. Usually the key parties will use the six or eight weeks of grandstanding debate to meet privately and work something out. That's especially so if, as in this case, there are enough votes in one party to blow through a filibuster.

But here's the thing: It's conceivable that we might not even get passage next week on the usually perfunctory motion to proceed to debate. That's because Republicans will filibuster even that, requiring 60 votes.

Lieberman will probably vote for this motion to proceed, having vowed only to vote against ending debate later. But Lincoln conspicuously hasn't said either way, on the motion to proceed or to end the filibuster.

Voting not to end the filibuster weeks hence would effectively kill whatever bill emerges after everyone has had their say. Voting now against a motion merely to proceed to consideration would be most irregular for a Democrat in a big Democratic majority and would seem on the surface to have no particular point.

But Lincoln believes a drawn-out process of arguing and voting down incendiary amendments would be a waste of time except for the occasional political perils along the way. She doesn't want to have to endure all of that merely to get to the point weeks hence at which she'd have to vote one uncomfortable way or the other on the filibuster.

She has told as much to Reid. She told President Obama the same thing. I'm told that Reid and Obama have nodded politely.

She sees nothing to be gained for Democrats by opening this bill to floor debate instead of working it out first.

What she would really like is for Reid to embrace her moderate and pragmatic Finance Committee bill. But he has entirely too many senators on his left flank to do that until and unless he simply has no other choice.

There are maybe 30 Democratic senators committed to the public health insurance option. They don't want to give it up before they are forced. They do not want their majority leader or their president to give it up pre-emptively.

It's going to come out eventually, most people think, but probably not until a red-state centrist up for imminent re-election, by whom I mean Blanche Lincoln, gets put through a wringer of high inconvenience and agitation.

In the face of that, it's possible, one supposes, that Lincoln could join Republicans next week in putting on the brakes pre-emptively by filibustering not the bill but even the motion to consider the bill.

Surely not, though. She'd almost have to switch parties after something like that and I'm not sure the Republicans would want her right now.

Most likely she'll vote most unhappily to proceed to consider a bill that she wishes for all the world the Senate wouldn't proceed to consider.

This is just not her lucky year. Maybe 2010 will be.

John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.