Indiana’s Dick Lugar has confirmed that he will be supporting the DREAM Act if and when it’s brought up for a vote in the Senate’s lame duck session. Lugar, a longtime sponsor of the DREAM Act, surprised many in recent days when he announced that he was having second thoughts about the bill.

The Senate was slated to hold a crucial procedural vote on the DREAM Act yesterday, but Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled it from the floor. Supporters now intend to bring it back next week, in a revised version designed to duplicate the one that the House of Representatives passed recently.

The White House has said that they anticipate needing seven Republican votes to secure the DREAM Act’s passage. Right now they have two — Lugar and outgoing Utah senator Bob Bennett. Olympia Snowe of Maine, long regarded as a must-have Republican vote on the bill, reportedly decided this week to oppose it.

Right now the DREAM Act’s only barrier to passage — and it’s a huge one — is political. The list of current and past supporters of the measure in the Senate is well over the sixty it now needs. The odds against adoption of the bill remain extremely long, but the political climate in Washington is in an unusual state of flux right now, and additional surprises are far from out of the question.

Alfie Meadows, a twenty-year-old philosophy student at England’s Middlesex University, spent three hours in surgery last night after a police beating left him with bleeding on the brain.

Meadows, a participant in yesterday’s fee protests, was part of a large group that had been “kettled” — rounded up indiscriminately and confined by police. When he attempted to leave the kettle with a group of friends — including two sympathetic professors — he suffered a blow to the head from a police baton.

There is no indication that Meadows attacked police or engaged in any acts of violence. There had been an announcement earlier that peaceful protesters would be allowed to leave the kettle if they approached police checkpoints, and this is reportedly what Meadows was attempting to do when he was beaten.

Although the wound bled immediately, it wasn’t until hours later that neurological symptoms appeared. That night he suffered confusion and vomiting, and later inability to speak or move his left hand. He was rushed to the hospital, but collapsed en route.

According to his mother, who was also present at the protest, he is now conscious and able to speak, though she said he is expected to be hospitalized “for quite a while.”

Police have offered no defense of the beating, which is said to be under investigation.

There will be a vigil against police brutality held this afternoon at Charing Cross Hospital, where Meadows is being treated.

Update | Meadows’ Facebook profile photo is a poster for the “campaign to save philosophy at Middlesex” University. Clearly we’re dealing with a dangerous revolutionary here.

December 12 | Meadows’ mother says police attempted to prevent her son from being treated at the hospital to which he was taken by ambulance. It was only the invention of an ambulance worker that protected him from a transfer that could have resulted in his death. On the upside, she says, “He’s amazingly jolly now. I don’t know it that is from a sense of having survived or the morphine.”

The United States Senate is the most anti-democratic institution in the United States government. Not only do the Senate’s rules allow any 40 senators to override the will of that 100-member body’s majority, but the Senate’s one-state-two-votes structure gives that power to a minority of a minority.

The pernicious effect of that unrepresentative structure was demonstrated yet again in today’s vote on repeal of the US military’s anti-gay “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy. In that vote 57 senators, elected to represent a large majority of the American people, were defeated by just forty, representing just 34.44% of the nation.*

California’s two senators, representing some 38 million people, voted for repeal today. But their votes were cancelled out — and indeed outweighed — by those of Wyoming’s two senators, who represent just 533,000.

If you’ve ever wondered why a policy change supported by 67% of the American public remains so resistant to repeal, now you know.

*Where a state’s senators split on DADT repeal, I counted each as “representing” half of that state’s population.

Last night, just before midnight, riot police occupied the University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras. Students protesting a major tuition increase had ended a 48-hour strike shortly before. According to one source liveblogging events as they occur [Original|Translation], police “seized control” of the university early this morning. Ten of the university’s eleven campuses were shuttered for two months earlier this year by a student strike.

This is the first time in nearly thirty years that state police have been brought onto the grounds of a University of Puerto Rico campus. As one columnist [Original|Translation] writes this morning,

The university administration has thrown in the towel regarding the possibility of achieving a mediated solution to the conflict. … For decades, there has been a consensus in the country, which no one had questioned, that the police have no place on college campuses. … The administration can not have forgotten the tragic history of police interventions in the UPR and deaths sequel – yes, death – and historical traumas. … There will be very little that the police can provide in terms of order.

Order in the UPR means that every student, teacher and employee can enjoy quiet, take or give their classes, walk around campus, have quiet lunch in the cafeteria or under a tree, live fully the magical college life. There is no way to imagine how, through police presence and pressure, this can be achieved. The only way to achieve that is through dialogue. And that now seems further away than ever.

Early this morning UPR’s president released a statement declaring that “the police have restored order and security in the Rio Piedras Campus and will remain present in this hall for the time necessary to ensure that this is true.”

University administrators plan to open the campus for classes at noon (that’s 11 am Eastern Time, about half an hour from now). Faculty will be meeting today to discuss the police presence and their response, and student strategizing is ongoing.

Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) was always going to be a tough get for the DREAMers. Though she voted for the bill three years ago she’s up for re-election in 2012, her home state just elected a Republican governor, and she’s worried about a possible Tea Party primary challenge. Add to all that the fact that she’s made something of a career of raising and then dashing Dems’ hopes on close votes, and it wasn’t hard to predict what was likely to happen.

Last night, according to a statement published on the conservative National Review website, Snowe made it official.

“Millions of illegal immigrants could attempt to become legal residents as a result of this proposal, according to some estimates,” she said, and that can’t be allowed to happen. Never mind that eligibility for the DREAM Act has always been restricted, and was narrowed further by recent concessions by its sponsors. Never mind that the legal residency process it would establish is long and arduous. Never mind that Snowe voted for a broader version of the bill in 2007. She’s got an election to win.

If Snowe’s “no” vote is confirmed, it’s a huge blow to an already imperiled bill. A few days ago the White House said they anticipated needing seven Republican votes to make the DREAM Act a reality. At the time I could only come up with six plausible GOP votes for the bill, and Snowe was one of them. Without her, I don’t see how the math can be made to work.

It’s been clear for a long time that winning the Senate was going to be tough, and the odds have grown longer in recent weeks.

Right now they’re very long indeed.

9:30 am Update | The US Senate is scheduled to convene in moments to take up the DREAM Act, with a vote expected before noon. Note that today’s vote will be what’s known as a “cloture” vote, with supporters needing 60 votes out of the 100 in the Senate to bring the bill to the floor for discussion.

11:30 am | The Senate is now voting … but not on cloture. Last night the House passed an amended version of the DREAM Act, and both the House and Senate need to pass identical bills to send them to the President. So Majority Leader Harry Reid asked the Republicans to allow the Senate to vote on the House version today. They refused. So now the DREAM Act’s supporters have moved to table the original bill so that the House version can be brought up in its place.

11:50 am | The motion to table passed in a 59-40 vote, which means that the Senate will be free to consider the House version of the DREAM Act next week. Democrats overwhelmingly voted for the motion, Republicans overwhelmingly against, with most of the exceptions being DREAM Act fence-sitters. What tea-leaf-reading this makes possible is something I don’t know, but will try to find out. (Update: See 12:55 below — this vote tells us nothing.)

12:40 pm | CNN is reporting, incorrectly, that today’s vote killed the DREAM Act. MSNBC gets it right.

12:50 pm | Immigration policy blog MicEvHill.com says Harry Reid “pulled a procedural rabbit out of his hat” today, and may have given the bill’s chances of passage a boost.

12:55 pm | I’ve looked at the roll call on today’s vote, and I’m not seeing any patterns that are of any use. On-the-fence Republican Lisa Murkowski voted for the measure, but so did four GOP senators who are known DREAM Act opponents. On the other side of the aisle, DREAM Act skeptic Mark Pryor voted against, but so did three Democratic supporters of the bill.