If I Were Dictator,

I would abolish the United States Senate as being an absolutely useless body which creates all kinds of arcane rules that do nothing but hinder needed legislation. It is outrageous it ever got to this point where stalemate was the rule rather than the exception.

If the GOP wants a filibuster, return to the old system where they had to talk a bill to death, not this chickenshit stuff they have now.

"The use of the filibuster and the way it's led to backroom deals has created the impression in the heartland that the Senate is dysfunctional," said Jack Conway, a Democratic candidate facing Republican Rand Paul in Kentucky. "They don't understand why Washington can't address the issues people care about. People in Kentucky wanted people focused on jobs -- 14 months [of the health care debate] laid bare how broken the system was."

Conway was joined in his backing of filibuster reform by the three other Senate candidates who HuffPost interviewed for this story: Paul Hodes of New Hampshire, Elaine Marshall of North Carolina and Roxanne Conlin of Iowa. Sitting Senators Al Franken (D-Minn.), Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) also said they supported reform.

"It's not constitutional. It's not statutory. It's a rule," said Hodes, adding that he wasn't certain what the new rule should look like exactly, but the current ones needed to be reformed. "Everywhere I go, they say, 'Make 'em bring out the cots and the telephone books.' People are eager for real backbone and some toughness from Democrats."

Unfortunately, Democrats have squandered this shit and haven't put the GOP on the defensive. If, God forbid, the GOP gets in the majority next term, it's going to be an even bigger mess.

I'd just as soon see the Senate done away with.

The Democrats Want to Change

the filibuster rules, but I am afraid askin' ain't gettin'.

It no longer matters whether the Republicans are in the majority; they can stall legislation. It doesn't even matter if they have the White House, for a neoliberal occupies the Oval Office and seems willing to do the GOP's dirty work.

Paul Krugman

believes the health care "reform" bill is a significant achievement although terribly flawed, but the most notable thing about it is it passed at all, given the fact the U.S. Senate has some stupid rules that make significant change almost impossible.

This goes to the filibuster/cloture bullshit where a minority can sandbag almost all legislation because there isn't sixty votes to cut off any threat of a filibuster.

Krugman:

Back in the mid-1990s two senators — Tom Harkin and, believe it or not, Joe Lieberman — introduced a bill to reform Senate procedures. (Management wants me to make it clear that in my last column I wasn’t endorsing inappropriate threats against Mr. Lieberman.) Sixty votes would still be needed to end a filibuster at the beginning of debate, but if that vote failed, another vote could be held a couple of days later requiring only 57 senators, then another, and eventually a simple majority could end debate. Mr. Harkin says that he’s considering reintroducing that proposal, and he should.

But if such legislation is itself blocked by a filibuster — which it almost surely would be — reformers should turn to other options. Remember, the Constitution sets up the Senate as a body with majority — not supermajority — rule. So the rule of 60 can be changed. A Congressional Research Service report from 2005, when a Republican majority was threatening to abolish the filibuster so it could push through Bush judicial nominees, suggests several ways this could happen — for example, through a majority vote changing Senate rules on the first day of a new session.

Nobody should meddle lightly with long-established parliamentary procedure. But our current situation is unprecedented: America is caught between severe problems that must be addressed and a minority party determined to block action on every front. Doing nothing is not an option — not unless you want the nation to sit motionless, with an effectively paralyzed government, waiting for financial, environmental and fiscal crises to strike.

This is one of Krugman's best editorials. The Senate, along with the utter corruption of politicians because of no public financing of elections, is why our government is in such a hell of a fix and our country's problems are not being fixed.

How in the Hell Did the Senate Get So Screwed Up

and fail to pass anything of substance?

Blame the silly rules regarding cloture and filibustering.

Now NOTHING gets passed in Congress unless 3/5 of a majority in the Senate approves it instead of a simple majority, the way it is supposed to be. The GOP can literally hijack any kind of bill while not being in the majority.

From Fallows:

Again, this is a very well-explored issue in the academic literature and much of the blog world. For blog and magazine discussions, see here, here, here, here, and here. An authoritative academic treatment came from David Mayhew, of Yale, in his 2002 James Madison lecture for the American Political Science Association. It is available here in PDF and very much worth reading. Sample passage:
"That topic is supermajority rule in the U.S. Senate-- that is, the need to win more than a simple majority of senators to pass laws. Great checker and balancer though Madison was, this feature of American institutional life would probably have surprised him and might have distressed him....

"Automatic failure for bills not reaching the 60 mark. That is the current Senate practice, and in my view it has aroused surprisingly little interest or concern among the public or even in political science. It is treated as matter- of-fact. One might ask: What ever happened to the value of majority rule?

Everything I have mentioned here is familiar, including the fact that this newly-invented "check" was not part of the original check-and-balance constitutional design. But somehow it isn't familiar, in the sense of being part of general understanding and mainstream coverage of issues like the health reform bill. Talk shows analyze exactly how the Administration can get to 60 votes; they don't discuss where the 60-vote practice came from and what it has done to public life. I have a gigantic article coming out soon in the Atlantic -- long even by our standards! but interesting! -- which concerns America's ability to address big public problems, compared in particular with China's. The increasing dysfunction of public institutions, notably the Senate, is a big part of this story.

Our Idiot Senators

are deciding they are going to fart around trying to get a "public option" on health care while millions and millions of people are unemployed and hundreds of thousands are about to run out of federal extended unemployment benefits. What in the HELL is the matter with these senators?

Do they have a clue how badly people are hurting? Sure, it would be nice to have a public option in health care, but this ISN'T--repeat ISN'T--the biggest problem facing this country now.

Obama is largely to blame for this mess of screwed up priorities. The first day he was in office, he and Congress should have been working together to create JOBS programs to jumpstart the economy instead of bailing out Wall Street crooks. They should have been working on ways to get manufacturing back in this country by penalizing the hell out of companies which "outsource" jobs to slave labor countries. Instead, he and Congress are listening to the progressive bloggers and others whose priorities are so out of whack with the reality of what is going on in this country that they are putting the unemployed on the backburner.

Well, let me tell you this: At the rate Obama is going, he will NOT be re-elected, and we will end up stuck with a really bad president from the other party whose political philosophy will guarantee the third worldization of the United States.