Senate Democrats support filibuster reform

By Ezra Klein

They say elections have consequences. So too, it turns out, does obstruction. In a move that's as overdue as it is unexpected, every returning Senate Democrat has signed a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid calling for filibuster reform.

The letter is not specific on what sort of reform they'd like to see, but the basic outline looks to take its cues from Sen. Jeff Merkley's proposal: Filibusters would require continuous debate on the floor of the Senate, and they would only be allowed once the bill is on the floor (no more filibustering the motion to debate a bill, for instance). Democrats would also like to see the dead time between calling for a vote to break a filibuster and actually taking the vote reduced. “There need to be changes to the rules to allow filibusters to be conducted by people who actually want to block legislation instead of people being able to quietly say ‘I object’ and go home,” Sen. Claire McCaskill told the National Journal.

None of these changes would reverse the Senate's transformation into a 60-vote institution, of course. Instead, they would speed up and streamline what happens around those votes. While many Americans understand that you need 60 votes to break a filibuster, relatively few realize that you need about a week of floor time on the Senate to even take those votes -- and the minority has been quick to understand that time is precious in the modern Senate, and so the mere threat of a filibuster on less-pressing items like nominations is enough to stop them cold. It's not that Reid doesn't have 60 votes to break the filibuster, but that he doesn't have a week to spend doing it.

It's no surprise that some Senate Democrats want to see the practice reworked. What's remarkable is that all Senate Democrats want to see it reworked. It's not just the young senators like Jeff Merkley and Tom Udall and Michael Bennett, but the older veterans like Barbara Mikulski and Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin.

Their unity stems from an unlikely source: Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has mounted more filibusters in the past two years than occurred in the ’50s and ’60s combined. Uncontroversial bills like an extension of unemployment benefits that passed 97-0 and food-safety legislation that passed with 73 votes frequently faced multiple filibusters and months of delay. The minority has been so relentless and indiscriminate in deploying the once-rare failsafe that the majority has finally decided to do something about it.

They may not do much -- at least this year. But even doing a little matters. It puts the minority on notice that the filibuster is not sacrosanct. Having reformed it once, Democrats -- and, of course, Republicans, when they retake the majority -- can reform it again. There is nothing novel about that: In 1917, the Senate voted to allow 67 senators to break a filibuster, and in 1975, the Senate voted to bring that down to 60. Sen. Tom Udall, who's been at the center of the efforts to convince the Senate to begin updating its rulebook with each new Congress, has argued that this knowledge will make both the majority and the minority act more responsibly in the future, as they'll labor under the knowledge that misuse of the rules will mean reform of the rules. If Democrats don't lose their nerve, we'll soon find out whether he's right.