The Reagan Legacy Project, started in 1997 by the conservative lobbyist Grover Norquist, seeks to name something - a stadium, a stretch of turnpike, anything - after Reagan in every state in the union.

John Tomicki, the conservative lobbyist who helped negotiate the bill, said he suspected that any court challenge of the parental notification law would be financed largely by abortion providers, like Planned Parenthood, whose employees' livelihoods are at stake.

On April 15th, a.k.a. tax day, protest rallies promoted by conservative lobbyists and Fox News television hosts attracted a couple of hundred thousand people to a couple of hundred locations around the country.

Many at today's hearing - senators, liberal and conservative lobbyists and even reporters - took it as a warm-up for more serious confirmation fights to come.

Congressional aides said Friday that the testimony of Paul G. Weyrich, a conservative lobbyist, surprised both senior Senators and forced into public a discussion what they had wanted to confine to a closed-door session.

That task by the firm, Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, will be led by Bill Paxon, a former Republican congressman from New York who is now a prominent conservative lobbyist.

"Punditry analysis is like water off a duck's back to conservatives," said Ed Gillespie, a conservative lobbyist and strategist.

The reaction to Governor Wilson's action today was equally impassioned among conservative lobbyists.

"His name has come up in meetings time and time again," she told CNN, the broadcaster, saying Republicans were "more in thrall" to a conservative lobbyist than the needs of the rest of the country.

Other senators and some conservative lobbyists spoke of their personal sympathy for Judge Ginsburg and his ordeal in the last few days.