In each of these cases, Democrats tried and failed to find 60 votes, but there are plenty of other cases where they didn't even try. The way the filibuster works today is that even the threat can stop legislation in its tracks. Because the process takes Senate floor time, the Democratic majority has in recent years preferred to avoid drawn-out confrontations by essentially giving in to threats and moving on to other business. Small wonder that the Senate—and by extension the entire government—has become so paralyzed.

There is one other rarely discussed aspect to all this that illustrates why the Senate today, far from being “the most deliberative body in the world,” is one afflicted by the most perverse form of "minority rule.” Because of the Senate's distorted and malapportioned structure, in which every state has two senators regardless of population (so California's 38 million citizens have the same representation in the Senate as Wyoming, with only a half a million people), the 41 GOP senators who block legislation often represent only about a third of the national population, since Republicans disproportionately represent sparsely-populated states. Conversely, when “only” a bare majority of senators support a bill or support breaking a filibuster, those senators often represent two thirds or more of the American people. Filibuster abuse is an extreme form of "minority rule," undermining the majoritarianism that founders like Alexander Hamilton and James Madison so valued.

In essence, what has occurred in the Senate over the last 15 years is an extraordinary change to the constitutional structure of our government—without any actual constitutional amendment. The Constitution creates three "kill points" in the process of passing or rejecting federal legislation: the president, the House, and the Senate. Frequent filibuster abuse has created a fourth kill point: the Senate minority. Since it's necessary to run the gauntlet and overcome all four kill points to enact a law, it's no surprise that this has been an historically unproductive Congress.

So abolishing the filibuster for only non-Supreme Court appointments is not even half a loaf, even though it is a necessary step. The only way to return this filibuster-mad Senate to "majority rule" is to abolish the filibuster for legislation too.