How a letter from 1964 shows what's wrong with the Senate today

[Mr. Sparkle]

One of the challenges in arguing about the use of the filibuster is that the filibuster has changed drastically in recent decades, but it's done so quietly. Quietly enough that people don't really understand that it's changed at all. That leads to an understandable complacency: If we've always had the filibuster, and we've done pretty well thus far, then maybe the filibuster isn't worth mucking with.

But though we've long had the filibuster, we have not long had a Senate that used it to impose a 60-vote requirement on all controversial legislation. Dramatizing the difference between the filibuster that was used to express opposition and filibuster that is used to impose a supermajority voting requirement is a bit difficult. But David Broockman, a senior at Yale, sent along a letter he came across in the LBJ presidential library that does it better than any document I've seen.

"We would win by a vote of 55 to 45." Phil Schiliro would not write that letter to David Plouffe today. There would be no vote of 55 to 45, because the filibuster would forestall the vote. The fact that 55 Democrats support a controversial bill would be immaterial unless there was some strategy for attracting five more senators to the side of the administration.

But in Johnson's time, it wasn't that way. And good thing, too. Until 1975, it took 67 votes, not 60, to break a filibuster. If the Senate had operated under a de facto 67 votes rule, little would have been done, because so much could have been stopped. Medicare eventually passed with 68 votes, but that was in part because it was going to pass, and bills that pass attract more votes than they would otherwise get. (It's also, as political scientists argue, because the country was less polarized, and the minority did not see blocking legislation as its primary path to power, or as the primary demand of its base.)

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/11/how_a_letter_from_1964_shows_w.html

There are some good posts in the comment section underneath which oddly go into more detail. I am convinced that they should go back to the old system where when, just as a filibuster is introduced, it stops passage of all bills until it is lifted, and secondly, if a filibuster is introduced, they cannot do so quietly but instead have to stay on the floor talking away until it is lifted. At the moment, it is just too easy to start filibusters with little consequences.