And again, we are talking here about the question of whether there will be a floor debate in the Senate that will culminate in an actual vote on a resolution.  That the public debate continues is obvious, and that debate will continue until the war is over (and even then, it will continue).

At the moment, the failure to move any of the resolutions to the floor has meant that the Senate is currently moving on to other business.

Meanwhile, WaPo reports that 7 GOP Senators Back War Debate:

Senate Republicans who earlier this week helped block deliberations on a resolution opposing President Bush’s new troop deployments in Iraq changed course yesterday and vowed to use every tactic at their disposal to ensure a full and open debate.

In a letter distributed yesterday evening to Senate leaders, John W. Warner (Va.), Chuck Hagel (Neb.) and five other GOP supporters of the resolution threatened to attach their measure to any bill sent to the floor in the coming weeks. Noting that the war is the “most pressing issue of our time,” the senators declared: “We will explore all of our options under the Senate procedures and practices to ensure a full and open debate.”

The Senators in question (in addition to those noted above) are:

The other Republican senators who signed the letter were Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, Norm Coleman (Minn.), Gordon Smith (Ore.), and George V. Voinovich (Ohio).

We return, at this point, to an “inside baseball” discussion of how the Senate works.  On the one hand, Majority Leader Reid is treating the resolutions of issue to be dead, the seven signatories to the letter noted above are threatening to use various parliamentary procedures to reignite the discussion:

The letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was not more specific about the Republican senators’ strategy for reviving the war debate. But under the chamber’s rules, senators have wide latitude in slowing the progress of legislation and in offering amendments, regardless of whether they have anything to do with the bill.

Of course, there is nothing that would stop any member of the Senate from writing a new proposed resolution and then trying to find a way of getting it to the floor.

Ultimately what has happened here in the last several days is that a Senator (Levin) tried to get a specific proposed resolution before the chamber for debate and a vote.  Two other alternative resolutions also emerged (one may have been in the form of an amendment).  At any rate, the votes were not there to proceed to debate.  That led to all the brouhaha over whether the GOP was blocking debate (in a sense they were), and has led the Senate to move on to new business.  This is all wholly normal for Senate operations.

Update: Edited to fix an awkward sentence.