An Indian American woman is involved in the latest controversy over Senate procedures in the US.

Lawyer Dimple Gupta is the co-author of a 67-page treatise on how a majority party can fight the filibuster - which means to make a long speech in order to delay or prevent a new law being made.

The book has apparently driven the Republican strategy in the Senate. The Republicans have warned they will do away with the 200-year old right to filibuster if Democrats don't give an up or down vote on President George W. Bush's judicial nominations.

Gupta, along with Martin Gold, wrote the booklet which carries 434 footnotes and carries the long but appropriate title -  "The Constitutional Option to Change Senate Rules and Procedures: A Majoritarian Means to Overcome the Filibuster".

Gold is a lobbyist and an expert on Senate parliamentary procedure and Gupta is a Justice Department lawyer. The two wrote this treatise last fall for the conservative Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy.

Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the powerful Judiciary Committee that handles judicial nominations, recently hired Gupta as "nominations counsel" and that hire made clear to Democrats and other Congress watchers that the Republican majority was going to threaten a hardline proposal calling for a constitutional amendment to rid themselves of the filibuster as the Democrats went into the trenches to defend it.

The filibuster being one of the few ways a minority can exert power in certain circumstances, the Democrats contend their Republican colleagues are refusing to make any compromise on the controversial judicial nominations, so they are going to resort to the "nuclear option".