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This afternoon I stopped by the Heritage Foundation for the weekly Conservative Blogger's Briefing. Rep. Jeff Flake was there to talk about the new Pork Parade website, but most of the questions were about the Paulson bailout plan. Flake is against it, and I asked him how much opposition there is on the right. He said everyone at this morning's conference meeting was unhappy, but wouldn't venture an estimate as to how many would actually vote against the bailout.

While some in the room were comforted by this, my between-the-lines reading is that there will be a lot of Republicans who grumble about the plan and then vote for it anyway. Later I ran into a couple of reporter friends who'd just come from Capitol Hill, both of them working on bailout-related stories, and they generally concurred with my assessment. Apparently, only ten out of twenty Representatives who were at a Republican Study Committee press conference today to complain about the bailout are actually voting against it.

Patrick Ruffini thinks that Republicans should oppose the plan en masse. Unless the Democrats add something to it that's really egregious, I wouldn't count on it. There's a (perhaps not entirely wrong) consensus that something has to be done, and politicians are generally terrified of looking like they're doing nothing.