Tag Archives: Filibuster

Facing the Truth about American Politics

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Chris Hayes of MSNBC summed it up tonight:

Today, [House Minority Leader] Kevin McCarthy made a deeply humiliating, almost too awful to watch pilgrimage down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring of the twice-impeached, possibly soon-to-be-indicted ex-president. Because there is no line to cross that goes too far for him or for them or for the party. This is where we are, folks, this is what everyone has to acknowledge. There will be no self-regulation. No self-governance. No, “Did we go too far?” No mea culpas. There will be no growth. This is what the contemporary Republican Party and conservative movement right now is, so now the question is, the question becomes “What do you do with that?” There are people like that who are part of the government of this country, who believe what they believe.

Paul Krugman expanded on the topic:

Here’s what we know about American politics: The Republican Party is stuck, probably irreversibly, in a doom loop of bizarro. If the Txxxx-incited Capitol insurrection didn’t snap the party back to sanity — and it didn’t — nothing will.

What isn’t clear yet is who, exactly, will end up facing doom. Will it be the [Republican Party] as a significant political force? Or will it be America as we know it? Unfortunately, we don’t know the answer. It depends a lot on how successful Republicans will be in suppressing votes.

Even I had some lingering hope that the Republican establishment might try to end Txxxxism. But such hopes died this week.

On Tuesday Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, who has said that [the ex-president’s] role in fomenting the insurrection was impeachable, voted for a measure that would have declared [an impeachment] trial unconstitutional . . . 

On Thursday, the House minority leader — who still hasn’t conceded that Joe Biden legitimately won the presidency, but did declare that Txxxx “bears responsibility” for the attack on Congress . . . — visited Mar-a-Lago, presumably to make amends.

In other words, the G.O.P.’s national leadership, after briefly flirting with sense, has surrendered to the fantasies of the fringe. Cowardice rules.

And the fringe is consolidating its hold at the state level. The Arizona state party censured the Republican governor for the sin of belatedly trying to contain the coronavirus. The Texas G.O.P. has adopted the slogan “We are the storm,” which is associated with QAnon, although the party denies it intended any link. Oregon Republicans have endorsed the completely baseless claim, contradicted by the rioters themselves, that the attack on the Capitol was a left-wing false flag operation.

How did this happen to what was once the party of Dwight Eisenhower? Political scientists argue that traditional forces of moderation have been weakened by factors like the nationalization of politics and the rise of partisan media, notably Fox News.

This opens the door to a process of self-reinforcing extremism . . .  As hard-liners gain power within a group, they drive out moderates; what remains of the group is even more extreme, which drives out even more moderates; and so on. A party starts out complaining that taxes are too high; after a while it begins claiming that climate change is a giant hoax; it ends up believing that Democrats are Satanist pedophiles.

This process of radicalization began long before Dxxxx Txxxx; it goes back at least to Newt Gingrich’s takeover of Congress in 1994. But Txxxx’s reign of corruption and lies, followed by his refusal to concede and his attempt to overturn the election results, brought it to a head. And the cowardice of the Republican establishment has sealed the deal. One of America’s two major political parties has parted ways with facts, logic and democracy, and it’s not coming back.

What happens next? You might think that a party that goes off the deep end morally and intellectually would also find itself going off the deep end politically. And that has in fact happened in some states. Those fantasist Oregon Republicans, who have been shut out of power since 2013, seem to be going the way of their counterparts in California, a once-mighty party reduced to impotence in the face of a Democratic supermajority.

But it’s not at all clear that this will happen at a national level. True, as Republicans have become more extreme they have lost broad support; the G.O.P. has won the popular vote for president only once since 1988, and 2004 was an outlier influenced by the lingering rally-around-the-flag effects of 9/11.

Given the unrepresentative nature of our electoral system, however, Republicans can achieve power even while losing the popular vote. A majority of voters rejected Txxxx in 2016, but he became president anyway, and he came fairly close to pulling it out in 2020 despite a seven million vote deficit. The Senate is evenly divided even though Democratic members represent 41 million more people than Republicans.

And the Republican response to electoral defeat isn’t to change policies to win over voters; it is to try to rig the next election. Georgia has long been known for systematic suppression of Black voters . . . the Republicans who control the state are doubling down on disenfranchisement, with proposed new voter ID requirements and other measures to limit voting.

The bottom line is that we don’t know whether we’ve earned more than a temporary reprieve. A president who tried to retain power despite losing an election has been foiled. But a party that buys into bizarre conspiracy theories and denies the legitimacy of its opposition isn’t getting saner, and still has a good chance of taking complete power in four years.

Three more items:

Pennsylvania G.O.P. leaders have made loyalty to the defeated ex-president the sole organizing principle of the party, and would-be candidates are jockeying to prove they fought the hardest for him (NY Times).

After an election filled with misinformation and lies about fraud, Republicans have doubled down with a surge of bills to further restrict voting access in recent months, according to a new analysis . . .  There are currently 106 pending bills across 28 states that would restrict access to voting (The Guardian).

Arizona G.O.P. lawmaker introduces bill to give Legislature power to toss out election results (NBC News).

With the presidency and small majorities in the House and Senate, Democrats have an opportunity to deliver on many of their campaign promises, not just a few. That will almost certainly require ending or severely limiting the ability of the Republican minority in the Senate to kill legislation. If Democrats don’t have the foresight and courage to do that, we may be facing a very bleak future.

Go Big or Go Home

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Eric Levitz of New York Magazine on the choice facing the Democratic Party:

The Electoral College now has a four-point pro-[Republican] bias, meaning that if Biden [or whoever] wins the two-way popular vote by “only” 3.9 percent in 2024, he will have a less than 50 percent chance of winning reelection, and (2) the Republican Party has grown more openly contemptuous of democracy since Txxxx’s defeat. If the GOP does gain full control of the federal government in 2024, there is a significant risk it will further entrench its structural advantages through anti-democratic measures, so as to insulate right-wing minority rule against the threat of demographic change.

To defy political gravity, and fortify U.S. democracy against the threat of authoritarian reaction, Democrats need to either rebalance the electoral playing field through the passage of structural reforms, or attain a degree of popularity that no in-power party has achieved in modern memory. If the filibuster remains in place, doing the former will be impossible and the latter highly unlikely.

The Constitution limits the Democrats’ capacity to correct the biases of America’s governing institutions. But the party could significantly reduce the overrepresentation of white rural America in the Senate by granting statehood to the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and any other U.S. territory that wants it. The party could also prohibit partisan redistricting, ban felon disenfranchisement, erode practical barriers to the political participation of working-class people and immigrants, make it easier for workers to form unions, grant citizenship to 11 million undocumented immigrants, and pack the Supreme Court if it interferes with the implementation of these reforms.

But none of those measures are going to attract ten Republican votes in the Senate. And none of them are achievable through the budget-reconciliation process.

If Democrats do not pass structural reforms, their odds of retaining both chambers of Congress in 2022 aren’t good. The president’s party almost always loses seats in midterms. . . .

All this said, Democrats could have some extraordinary winds at their back. Biden has a decent shot of presiding over a post-pandemic economic boom. To the extent that Democrats can juice that recovery with further growth and wage-boosting measures — while maintaining the enthusiasm of their core interest groups — they may pull off the unprecedented in 2022.

But it’s hard to see how the party can do that while leaving the filibuster fully intact. Democrats will be incapable of honoring their (now decade-old) IOUs to civil-rights organizations, labor unions, and immigrant communities if they allow the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to remain in place. . . .

In the immediate term, the Democrats’ internal conflict over the filibuster will move to the backburner. Joe Biden’s COVID-relief package and green-infrastructure “recovery” plan consist primarily of tax-and-spending measures that the party can advance through the budget-reconciliation process. And Schumer has signaled that he intends to bend the rules of that process as far as the Senate parliamentarian will let him, arguing that both a ban on new vehicles with internal-combustion engines and a $15 minimum wage are actually, primarily means of reducing government spending, when you really think about it.

But once reconciliation is done, attention will turn to the large stack of Democratic-coalition priorities that are currently subject to a 60-vote requirement. It will not be easy for Schumer to tell the NAACP that his caucus values a “Senate tradition” (that is anti-constitutional, historically associated with Jim Crow rule, and less than two decades old in its present form) more than it values a new Voting Rights Act. Nor will it be easy for the majority leader to tell organized labor that it will just have to wait until next time to see a $15 minimum wage (assuming that doesn’t get through reconciliation) or collective-bargaining reform. And it might be hard for Schumer to accept that he probably won’t ever wield majority power again after 2022 because his caucus would rather maintain the GOP’s structural advantage in the upper chamber than abolish the filibuster and add new states.

For these reasons, Schumer, Senate Democrat Whip Dick Durbin, and Delaware senator (and Biden confidant) Chris Coons have all telegraphed an intention to eliminate the filibuster if McConnell obstructs their coalition’s priorities. The apparent hope is that — while Manchin, Sinema, and a few others support the filibuster in the abstract — in the heat of a legislative battle over voting rights or a $15 minimum wage, they may consent to weakening the filibuster while lamenting what Mitch McConnell is making them do.

Sinema and Manchin have repeatedly insisted that they will not “eliminate” or “get rid of” the filibuster. But there are plenty of ways to erode the Senate’s 60-vote requirement that stop short of filibuster abolition. You could create new exemptions, modeled on budget reconciliation, that allow for the passage of certain categories of legislation by simple majority vote. Or you could restore the requirement for those mounting a filibuster to speak continuously from the Senate floor. Or you could throw every Democratic priority into a reconciliation bill and then let Kamala Harris overrule the parliamentarian when she objects.

But Manchin & Co.’s cooperation with this scheme is far from assured. The Democratic Party has a vital interest in passing sweeping reforms that gratify its base and mitigate its structural disadvantages. But Joe Manchin doesn’t necessarily have an interest in the institutional health of the Democratic Party.

Our Republic’s founders famously disdained political parties. And partisanship is a pejorative in contemporary American discourse. But our democracy’s present affliction lies in the weakness of its parties, not in their strength. Were the GOP a stronger institution, the Txxxx presidency would never have happened. Were the Democratic leadership capable of formulating and enforcing a party line, the filibuster would not be long for this Earth.

While the Constitution failed to stymie the advent of political parties, it has kept them weaker than their overseas analogs. The Democratic Party is more of a loose association of elected officeholders than a coherent mass-member organization. As such, it has limited capacity to dictate terms to any of its incumbent senators, let alone to those whose job security would be enhanced by becoming Republicans. . . .

Thus the Democrats’ existential interest in eroding the filibuster remains on a collision course with its moderate senators’ aversion to power. Anyone with a fondness for democracy must hope that, against all odds, the forces of partisanship will prevail.

So Much For Unity — U.S. Senate Edition

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As part of a good news agenda, I’ve got a post lined up about Bernie Sanders becoming chairman of the Senate’s Budget Committee. Sanders ascends to that powerful position because Kamala Harris is now the vice president and three new Democratic senators were sworn in yesterday. That means the Democrats get 51 votes in case of a tie and the Republicans only get 50.

But as of now, Sanders isn’t chairman of anything. The odious Republican senator from Kentucky, Mitch McConnell, is already up to his old tricks.

You see, the Senate requires something called an “organizing resolution”. According to the Senate’s official site:

At the beginning of a new Congress, the Senate adopts an organizing resolution listing committee ratios, committee membership, and other agreements between the parties on the operation of the Senate. Typically a routine matter approved by unanimous consent agreement, on occasions when the Senate has been closely divided, the organizing resolution has provoked fierce debate.

The Democrats have said they’re willing to organize the Senate the way it was organized the last time there were 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans. That was the situation in 2001, the only difference being that Republicans had the White House, giving them the ability to break ties in their favor.

But organizing the Senate the same way as last time isn’t good enough for Mitch McConnell now that Democrats have the edge. He wants to change the organizing resolution so that the Democrats agree to never require majority rule in the Senate, i.e. to never abolish the  filibuster. That’s the ability of a single Senator to stop vital legislation without even identifying himself in public.

In 2021, if a senator wants to filibuster legislation, they don’t even have to hold the floor by talking for hours, the way an exhausted Jimmy Stewart did in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.

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Today, senators can simply say “No” to a piece of legislation — without even publicly identifying themselves. To override a senator’s filibuster, it takes a supermajority of at least 60 senators (a 60-40 vote). So unless your party has 20 more senators than the opposition, a filibuster can kill important legislation, even though most senators (and a majority of Americans) want it.

So here’s what McConnell is doing: 

McConnell is threatening to filibuster the Organizing Resolution, which allows Democrats to assume the committee Chair positions. It’s an absolutely unprecedented, wacky, counterproductive request. We won the Senate. We get the gavels (Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii).

Because of McConnell’s new demand, the U.S. Senate’s organizing resolution is still the one they had last week when the Senate and White House were run by Republicans. That means they’re still in charge of the committees that approve legislation before it can go to the whole Senate for a vote (and before the Senate can approve many of Biden’s nominees). Bernie Sanders and his Democratic colleagues who are supposed to be in charge of those committees are as powerless as they were before the inauguration!

It sounds like Democrats have to agree to keep the filibuster or they (and we) are screwed.

Except for one thing. Kamala Harris can take the gavel whenever she wants. Being Vice President of the United States automatically makes her President of the Senate. And that makes Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York the Majority Leader of the Senate, instead of the odious Mitch McConnell. In other words, the Democrats can now tell Mitch McConnell to go to hell if they want to. Whoever is Majority Leader of the Senate gets to control the proceedings, deciding, for example, what legislation the Senate gets to vote on. It’s quite a system.

Of course, the Constitution doesn’t mention the Senate Majority Leader. The Constitution doesn’t even mention political parties. Nor does the Constitution mention the filibuster. Someone who’s written a book about the filibuster and used to work for a Democratic senator explains where the filibuster came from:

The filibuster was not part of the original Senate because the Framers knew exactly how it’d be used — they saw McConnell coming. The filibuster represents Calhoun’s vision, not Madison’s. Calhoun wanted a Senate where the minority could block the majority (Adam Jentleson).

That’s John C. Calhoun, the Southern senator who wanted to protect the South and slavery from the Northern majority.

Calhoun was profoundly racist. He was slavery’s leading defender in the Senate. He argued on the Senate floor that slavery was a “positive good.” And he was motivated to innovate the filibuster by the desire to protect slavery — to give the South veto power. Bad, bad guy.

The filibuster means that, in many cases, you need at least a 60-40 vote to get something done in the Senate.

The de facto supermajority threshold was first forged against civil rights. Jim Crow-era segregationist senators repurposed a 1917 Senate rule to force every civil rights bill to clear a supermajority threshold, blocking them all. Only civil rights bills were blocked in this way.

The authors of the Constitution favored majority rule, except in a few special cases, like overruling a president’s veto or removing a president from office. Mr. Jentleson quotes an article in The New York Times:

The supermajority threshold of today flies in the face of the framers’ intent. They wanted the Senate to be a place where debate was thorough and thoughtful, but limited, and where bills passed or failed on majority votes when it became clear to reasonable minds that debate was exhausted. Originally, Senate rules included a provision allowing a majority to end debate, and an early manual written by Thomas Jefferson established procedures for silencing senators who debated “superfluous, or tediously.” Obstruction was considered beneath them.

The reason the framers set the threshold at a majority is that they wrote the Constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation, which they saw as a disaster because it required a supermajority of Congress to pass most major legislation. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 22, the idea that a supermajority encouraged cooperation had proven deceptive: “What at first sight may seem a remedy, is, in reality, a poison.” Rather than encourage cooperation, he prophesied, the effect of requiring “more than a majority” would be “to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice or artifices” of a minority to the “regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.”

So here we are. The Democrats can now make any rules they want for the Senate and adopt those rules by a 51-50 vote, as long as those rules don’t conflict with the Constitution. They could then pass any legislation they want and get President Biden’s signature on it. That would include things like Biden’s massive Covid relief bill, elements of the Green New Deal and statehood for Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico (giving the Democrats four more votes in the Senate). They could even expand the Supreme Court to cancel out the Republican majority’s ability to find reasonable laws unconstitutional.

Will they use their authority to defang Mitch McConnell, get rid of the filibuster and restore majority rule to the Senate? Before today, it was doubtful, because there are conservative or “traditionalist” Democrats who worry about changing Senate rules (see “Fear vs. the White Male Effect”). Back to Twitter:

The fact that Mitch McConnell can use the filibuster to prevent the majority from taking control of the Senate is a pretty good argument against the filibuster (Dan Pfeiffer).

McConnell makes mistakes and this may have been one. His obstruction playbook relies on stringing Dems along and keeping them believing a bipartisan deal is just around the bend. Filibustering the organizing resolution to prove he won’t filibuster Biden was too clever by half (Adam Jentleson).

Democrats who want to save the filibuster claim it encourages the two sides to work together for the common good. But they’re wrong:

To those who say the filibuster encourages bipartisanship, Hamilton addressed this directly in Federalist 22: “What at first sight may seem a remedy, is, in reality, a poison,” he wrote of a supermajority threshold. It doesn’t encourage cooperation, it encourages obstruction (Jentleson). 

The fact is that the Democrats are the party of Yes and the Republicans are the party of No. It’s time to stop making it so easy for them to say No to the majority, especially today when we face so many crises that require urgent action. 

E Pluribus Unum, For Better Or Worse

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Perhaps you’ve looked at a map and thought it might be a good idea if the United States came apart at the seams. I have. If only we could make those other people go away!

Abraham Lincoln didn’t agree, of course, but he never met our current president or Mitch McConnell. 

Akim Reinhardt, a history professor in Maryland, says we should seriously consider the idea:

Is there anything more clichéd than some spoiled, petulant celebrity publicly threatening to move to Canada if the candidate they most despise wins an election? These tantrums have at least four problems:

1. As if Canada wants you. Please.
2. Mexico has way better weather and food than Canada. Why didn’t you threaten to move there? Is it because of all the brown people? No, you insist. Is it the language? Well then if you do make it to Canada, here’s hoping they stick you in Quebec.
3. New Zealand seems to be the hip new Canada. I’ve recently heard several people threaten to move there. News flash, Americans: New Zealand wants you even less than Canada does.
4. [Note: #4 isn’t really a problem so I’m leaving it out.]

. . . I’ve got a much better alternative: Stay put and begin a serious, adult conversation about disuniting the states.

If, through the vagaries of the Electoral College, 45% of U.S. voters really do run this nation into an authoritarian kleptocratic, dystopian ditch, then instead of fleeing with your gilded tail between your legs, stay and help us reconfigure the nation. It might be the sanest alternative to living in Txxxx’s tyranny of the minority, in which racism and sexism are overtly embraced, the economy is in shambles, the pandemic rages unabated, and abortion may soon be illegal in most states as an ever more conservative Supreme Court genuflects to corporate interests and religious extremists.

And of course it cuts both ways. Should current polls hold and Joe Biden manage to win the election with just over half the popular vote, those on the losing side will be every bit as upset. So upset that they too would likely open to a conversation about remaking an America.

Indeed, no matter how this turns out, about half the nation will feel like they can no longer live with what America is becoming, even as they live in it. The losing side, whichever it may be, will want to wrest this country back from those who seem increasingly alien to them. So perhaps national salvation comes when the winning side remains open to a discussion the losers will launch about radically redesigning the United States. . . .

It is time for the rest of us to begin a serious discussion about national disincorporation. About disuniting the states. Because no matter who wins, about half the nation will not want to live with it. Tens of millions of Americans on the losing side will not trust the winner to govern fairly, competently, or with the nation’s best interests at heart.

It’s a recipe for disaster. We need to get ahead of this discussion. . . .

Let me be clear. I am not advocating a unilateral declaration of secession and military assault on federal installations like the treasonous, Confederate slave-owners did in 1861. Rather, I am advocating serious discussions about untangling this fractured nation. For finding a peaceful, constitutional solution that either dissolves or drastically reconfigures the United States.

I believe it may be the most sensible and mature approach to dealing with a deeply riven partisan divide that has done nothing but worsen these last forty years, and increasingly breeds mutual frustration and resentment among tens of millions of Americans. The U.S. constitutional system is predicated on compromise, and the Republican Party has spent the last quarter-century working against compromise with increasing fervency. That’s not a smear, it’s a statement of fact. It’s a central tenet of their politics. Republicans are openly dismiss compromise and try to get everything they want and accept nothing they don’t.

It has become dysfunctional. And it’s not going to change anytime soon. . . .

Though perhaps unfathomable at first glance, we may actually be nearing the point where a majority of Americans are ready to call it quits on our current national incarnation. . . .

After all, in the world of national governments, 231 years is a really long time. And it wouldn’t even be our first rodeo.

We have done this before. The Constitution, drafted in 1787 and ratified in 1789, peacefully replaced an earlier form of United States national government organized under the Articles of Confederation. Yes, drafting the Constitution and getting the nation to adopt it over the Articles were difficult processes, hardly perfect, and engendered a fair bit of acrimony at the time. But it came about, peacefully (for the most part), and led to something that’s lasted well over two centuries.

Is it so impossible then to imagine the United States reconfiguring itself once again?

Of course a new United States could take many shapes. . . .

But regardless of what shape it might take, perhaps the most important thing is to have the conversation. Like adults. To talk about what it means to share national governance; how it’s working to our satisfaction, and how it’s not; and what we might do to improve it. . . .

Or perhaps, irony wins the day. Maybe serious discussion about disunion actually help decrease partisan tensions. Simply broaching the topic in a serious manner may force many Americans to recognize how close we are to losing we’ve always known.

Or perhaps such discussions really do lead many Americans to decide that it’s time to replace We the People, with You and Us the People.

Unquote.

Prof. Reinhardt has a few ideas about how this dismemberment might be accomplished. We might become two or three nations; change the Constitution to give more power to individual states; combine states or divide them up, etc. To use two old phrases, thinking about dividing the U.S. is a parlor game and a pipe dream.

Here’s one reason. Although we think of blue states and red states, some of them are purple. In addition, if you drill down further, America is an even greater mixture of blue and red. This is a map with counties marked blue or red depending on how they voted in 2016, with each county assigned space on the map based on its population.

countycartrb512

Assigning either blue, red or purple to each county based on the percentage that voted one way or the other would make it even harder to separate us by our political leanings.

I think a better and more practical solution will be to reinstate majority rule in the United States by making the Electoral College obsolete, getting rid of the filibuster in the Senate and granting statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. That would allow the federal government to pursue more progressive policies, which would help the economy, allow more social ills to be addressed and reduce inequality.

We also need to remove some of the emotion surrounding three issues: abortion, gun control and the Supreme Court. Abortions are already becoming more rare; putting more emphasis on education and birth control would reduce them further. Private ownership of guns is here to stay; but somehow we need to do what the majority of Americans want, i.e.  institute sensible gun control. A revised, clarified Second Amendment might allow us to do that while protecting a citizen’s “right to bear arms”. The Supreme Court has become too political. I’d add three seats, so we’d have 12 justices evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. No more 5-4 decisions. If a ruling can’t get a majority, let the lower court decision stand. 

Maybe thinking about how we could make America a better country for people on the right and left and in the middle is also a parlor game and a pipe dream. It seems to me, however, that a more perfect union is within our grasp if we make the effort. It would be much harder to make those other people go away.

How to Fix Congress

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Congress is under the control of Republicans who are terribly afraid of primary challenges from right-wing nuts. So Congressional Republicans behave as if they are right-wing nuts themselves, even if they aren’t (some of them aren’t).

In a column devoted to reactions to President Obama’s recent economic speech, Alex Pareene responds to the idea that Obama needs “bold, new proposals” in order to get the Republicans to cooperate:

I dunno, the only bold new proposal I can think of that will meaningfully break down Republican resistance would be to massively expand the size of the House and institute nationwide nonpartisan redistricting, and somehow do this before the 2014 elections, and then get rid of the filibuster? That would be pretty bold.

The House doesn’t represent the will of the people, because small states are over-represented (some congressional districts are nearly twice as large as others) and recent gerrymandering results in more Republicans being elected than Democrats, even though Democrats get more votes. (This rightward tilt is made even stronger by the Republicans’ adherence to the so-called “Hastert Rule”: bills don’t get a vote unless they’re supported by a majority of Republicans, i.e. a majority of the majority).

The Senate, of course, was designed to give extra power to small states and the filibuster gives extra power to the minority. It’s a little-known fact that the original rules of both the House and Senate allowed debate to be ended by a majority vote. In 1806, however, Vice President Aaron Burr convinced senators that they didn’t need such a rule; the rule hadn’t been invoked recently so it was just cluttering up the rule book. That change created the possibility of a filibuster, the requirement that a super-majority be required to end debate. The first filibuster occurred 31 years later. Now ordinary business often requires the approval of 60 Senators. So much for majority rule.

Unfortunately, the likelihood that Mr. Parene’s “bold, new ideas” will soon be adopted is approximately zero. It’s true that the Senate might change its rules; that could happen now if some Democratic senators weren’t afraid of the consequences. But it’s highly unlikely that the House will be expanded (although someone is arguing for that to happen: http://www.thirty-thousand.org/). The most we can hope for is that Congressional districts will one day be drawn with little or no political influence — or that whoever carries out the next round of gerrymandering does a better job.

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/25/post_pundits_obama_economy_speech_boring_not_grand_bargain_y_enough/