In a Sunday front-pager for the Times about Senate gridlock, Jonathan Weisman notes that between 1917 and 1970 there was an average of just under one filibuster per year. During the nineteen-seventies it jumped to around thirty. For the past three years, the yearly average has been a hundred and twenty-nine—which I calculate to be just under one filibuster per day that the Senate is in session.

As Weisman reports, some Democratic senators are considering making a serious effort next January to place modest limits on this outrageous, abusive, blatantly unconstitutional practice. Many of their colleagues think that this would be a bad thing. Let’s take a glance at one of their arguments, shall we?

Critics of the idea [of filibuster reform], who exist in both parties, say such a change would do great damage, causing Washington to career from one set of policies to another, depending on which party held power.

Oh, my. Imagine that. After an election in which the voters chose one party rather than the other, something might … change? “Washington”—the government that has just been duly elected—might actually implement one set of policies rather than another? Quelle horreur!

As I point out in this week’s Comment, the voters did, in fact, choose one party rather than another on November 6th. The party they chose, narrowly but unambiguously, was the Democratic Party. But the House of Representatives will remain Republican, even though a million more Americans voted for Democratic than for Republican House candidates. And, unless something is done about the filibuster, the Senate will remain a legislative graveyard, even though the Democratic majority will be 55-45 rather than 53-47 (and even though ten million more Americans voted for Democrats than for Republicans in the thirty-three states that had Senate elections).

The filibuster is a bad idea when Democrats are nominally in charge, and it’s a bad idea when Republicans are in the supposed driver’s seat. Absent the filibuster, Congress would have passed meaningful climate-change and immigration reform, among other desiderata, by now. And, yes, President Reagan might have been able to abolish a federal agency or two back in the day. (He couldn’t even get rid of the tiny Legal Services Corporation.) Over time, the country will be better off if the parties can put their ideas into practice and be judged accordingly. As it is, neither side gets a fair shot, the voters never quite get what they voted for, and everybody complains about how politicians never keep their promises.

Illustration by Richard Thompson.