The body of Trifecta was uncovered this Monday, buried under the rubble of campaign signs and champaign corks. Last rites were performed by William H. Frist (DR.-TN), who also performed the autopsy. Few observers believed Trifecta, legislative pet of Dr. Frist, had the right parts – comprising a set of tax credit extensions, a controversial estate tax cut, and a minimum wage increase –or that it was fit to survive in Congress.

Yet GOP leaders marched on.

Prior to the midterms, House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) was adamant about staying the course with Trifecta, saying, "Will we break it up? Absolutely not. Do I need to spell it? Absolutely not. That bill is the bill and will be the bill and if anybody wants any part of the bill they get to vote for all of it or none of it."

Frist himself insisted earlier this year, “If the Senate kills the trifecta bill, we will not return to it this year. That means we would have no permanent death-tax reform, no tax-policy extenders and no minimum-wage increase,” Frist said. “It’s now or never.”

But after the triage unit moved in, Dr. Frist announced on Monday, "I think it's most likely that we will do one or more of those individually now."

During its brief legislative life, Trifecta was viewed differently by different GOP lawmakers. “I’m not the one doing the process,” Sen. Michael Enzi (R-WY) said in August. “If you watch the process, often it doesn’t go the way reasonable people thought it would go.” But incoming Senate “Republican” Leader Mitch McConnell (“no one likes the word ‘minority,’ so it’s not in my new official title,“ McConnell said in a phone call yesterday) thought Trifecta was not unreasonable but, in fact irresistible: “There’s no risk. It’s all reward … It’s a very compelling political package.”

Trifecta is survived by two of its three progeny. One, however, the death tax rollback, has all but rolled over and died. Former boxer and Trifecta pallbearer Harry Reid (D-NV) diagnosed Trifecta’s fatal defect early on. “"8,100 of the wealthy and well-off hit the jackpot, while millions of working families get $800 billion in [federal] debt," he said.

And he got all but four Democratic Senators to agree with him that a partial rollback of the tax was too expensive, to say nothing of the full repeal urged by Dr. Frist.

But Trifecta offspring Minnie Wage and Tex the Extender are widely expected to lead full and productive lives.

Minnie, representing the first increase in the minimum wage in almost a decade, has pride of place on incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 100 hour agenda. In fact, the House’s first act in 2007 may well be to pass the increase. Prospects for the wage hike look good even in the Senate, which blocked it several times under a GOP majority. Indeed, at a press conference the day after the “thumpin’,” President Bush said he could work with Democrats on the issue, provided there were some protections for small business.

The package of tax credits extensions has always been an obvious must-pass that its surgical attachment to Trifecta vexed the bejesus out of Senate Finance chair Charles Grassley (R-IA). Grassley, champion of the tax extensions and openly angry that they had been sacrificed by Frist on the altar of the estate tax, would probably take the knife out of his back from when Frist promised that the extenders would be included in the Senate Reconciliation bill and stick it in the trifecta if given half a chance.

Today, the extenders are considered a lame-duck slam dunk. In retrospect, it is a cause for wonder how the GOP, usually responsive to the pleading of the business community, could possible have blithely neglected this community’s concerns, not to mention those of parents, school teachers, and millions of other middle-class beneficiaries, right straight through the midterm campaign.

The obituary for Trifecta now complete, the executors of the estate having bestowed gifts and good fortune upon the survivors, rubber-neckers and curious onlookers are left to ponder, is it possible that the political fate of this little monster will be shared by the mastermind Dr. Frist/Frankenstein, who wasted so much Senate time on his legislative pet?