It’s now official: filibuster reform is dead. Ezra Klein explains what we get instead:
There is some good stuff in the agreement Reid and McConnell struck. The Senate will vote on eliminating secret holds, ending the timewaster of having the clerk read legislation out on the Senate floor, and cutting the number of nominees who require Senate confirmation by a third (which would free about 400 positions from the process). Reid and McConnell have also agreed, in principle, to avoid filibustering the motion to debate and to grant the other side more opportunities to amend legislation.
All that is laudable, particularly the effort to lower the number of nominees the Senate needs to confirm. But this process kicked off because Democrats were furious at Republican abuse of the filibuster. It’s ended with Democrats and Republicans agreeing that the filibuster is here to stay. And the reason is both simple and depressing: Democrats want to be able to use the filibuster, too. Both parties are more committed to being able to obstruct than they are to being able to govern. This is why people call the Senate dysfunctional.
Full-blown elimination of the filibuster was never in the cards, but it’s still pretty disappointing that the whole thing petered out this badly. As always, fear of what the other side could do with majority rule outweighs the prospect of what your own side could do with it. Unfortunately, this gives us a system in which neither party is truly responsible for making government function, and the only compromises available are ones that contain enough bribes to keep both parties happy. This is not how we’re going to win the future.
