Bill Frist has tasked Budget Committee Chair Judd Gregg, Finance Committee Chair Charles Grassley, Republican Policy Committee Chairman Jon Kyl, and Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) with developing a viable legislative strategy for the trifecta bill and asked them to report their recommendations on Friday.

Is he tasking them with failure?

It’s almost crunch time for the “trifecta,” that tripartite congressional concoction cooked up by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist that combines an estate tax cut, minimum wage hike, and package of popular tax credit extensions. The bill, H.R. 5970, passed the House in July but failed by three votes in the Senate right before August recess.

It failed because it included a massive estate tax cut costing $750 billion over 10 years. As even the estate tax’s most ardent enemies, save Dr. Frist, concede at this point, that is H.R. 5970’s poison pill. So long as it is part of the bill, nothing will make it sufficiently attractive to bring enough Democrats on board for it to pass.

Yet the rest of the bill can’t be allowed to fail because it includes extensions of a wide variety of popular tax breaks up for renewal. No one opposes these, and many depend on them, most conspicuously the research and development tax credit. The cost to business for Congress’s failure to renew this break: already prodigious, and unrecoverable without congressional action this year.

The tax credit extensions would fly through Congress in a heartbeat if liberated from the trifecta, while the estate tax is pure albatross.

Corporate tax directors have announced a lobbying day on the Hill tomorrow to tell Frist to relent on the estate tax. Their timing could not be better.

Frist (R-TN) has tasked Budget Chair Judd Gregg (R-NH), Finance Chair Charles Grassley (R-IA), Republican Policy Committee Chair Jon Kyl (R-AZ), and Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) with developing a viable legislative strategy for the trifecta and asked them to report their recommendations on Friday.

The Senate may reconvene after Frist's target Sept. 29 adjournment date in a lame-duck session after the Nov. 7 midterm elections.

With not a single of the FY 2007 appropriations bills passed yet, many think a lame-duck session looks inevitable. But these bills may be too much for a lame-duck session to finish. A continuing resolution by the 109th Congress can hand the matter to the 110th.

So there may be no need for a lame-duck session, which raises the stakes on September action on the trifecta.

Frist’s fingerprints are all over the failure of the first trifecta. He knew he didn’t have the votes and went ahead anyway, to burnish his Dr. Death Tax credentials for a potential 2008 presidential bid. But having insisted that the trifecta is indivisible – notionally to lure Democrats by making it the only route to a minimum wage increase – he’s stuck with offering it intact or not at all.

Aware that the object of his obsession – the estate tax – is killing the trifecta, Frist needs a strategy to extricate himself from his bind and he needs it quickly.

This is where this task force gang of four was supposed to come in and save the trifecta in the nick of time.

But the gang has begun shooting its mouth off to the media. And it is isn’t shooting straight.

Lott has sought to get the three votes the trifecta needs by floating the irresistible idea in the press of adding a proposal to extend the Medicare Part D deadline that infuriated the nation’s seniors.

Kyl, who counts estate tax votes in the Senate better than anyone, says that the trifecta would still be a legislative loser -- that it can’t pass not matter how sweetened or larded.

Gregg says with a straight face that the prospects for the bill will improve drastically after the election, when partisan sentiment recedes and the Democrats will be free to vote their hearts on the estate tax at last and change their votes on the trifecta.

And Grassley, champion of the tax extensions and openly angry that they have been sacrificed by Frist on the altar of the estate tax, would probably take the knife out of his back and stick it in the trifecta if given half a chance.

Grassley said in an interview yesterday that if Congress does not pass the extenders before the next recess, it would pose problems for the IRS. According to him, the IRS sends its forms to the printer on Nov. 1, so if the extenders are not enacted until after that date, the IRS would then be forced to print "supplemental" forms based on the new law.

He illuminated the strategic options in his own homespun fashion yesterday: "If you want to get this passed so it can impact on this election, it has to happen obviously before Sept. 29 – whether it's for the estate tax or for the extenders, or whether it's for the minimum wage – or whether its all in one package."

Can you see a strategy emerging from this sad pile of feathers by Friday?

At least Frist will have accomplished one thing. Having outsourced the trifecta to his trusty gang of four, he may ensure that a handful of fingerprints will be all over its next failure.