Washington

AFTER months of debate, Senate Democrats this summer broke a Republican filibuster against a bill to extend unemployment benefits. But the Republicans insisted on applying a technicality in the Senate rules that allowed for 30 more hours of floor time after a successful vote to end debate. As a result, the bill  with its desperately needed and overdue benefits for more than 2 million unemployed Americans  was pointlessly delayed a few days more.

The Senate, once the place for slow and careful deliberation, has been overtaken by a culture of obstructionism. The filibuster, once rare, is now so common that it has inverted majority rule, allowing the minority party to block, or at least delay, whatever legislation it wants to oppose. Without reform, the filibuster threatens to bring the Senate to a halt.

It is easy to forget that the widespread use of the filibuster is a recent development. From the 1920s to the 1950s, the average was about one vote to end debate, also known as a cloture motion, a year; even in the 1960s, at the height of the civil rights debates, there were only about three a year.

The number of cloture motions jumped to three a month during the partisan battles of the 1990s. But it is the last decade that has seen the filibuster become a regular part of Senate life: there was about one cloture motion a week between 2000 and 2008, and in the current Congress there have been 117  more than two a week.