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That's why filibuster tactics, once rare, have become so regular that the crucial number in getting anything enacted is not a 51-vote Senate majority. It is 60, the votes it takes to end debate and force action.
Long delays are the rule, not the exception. So are the kind of deals Sen. Harry Reid, the majority leader, made to line up the votes he needed to get the health care overhaul passed. He said the dealmaking was no more than the legislative process at work, calling it compromise and suggesting that most senators probably had some provision tucked into the measure to serve state interests back home....
In 1975, the rules were changed to make it easier to end filibusters, with 60 votes instead of 67.
Enter the rule of unintended consequences. Making it easier to stop filibusters also made it easier to conduct them, or threaten to. That's almost automatic. One Republican or another has done it more than 100 times this year. Democratic leaders have filed 67 cloture motions, and there have been 39 votes to end debate, 35 successful.
In the last Congress there were 112 Senate cloture votes, far and away the record as the Democratic majority tried to fend off Republican delaying tactics. Democrats know the system; they used it themselves when they were outnumbered. But Republicans have made more of it since they lost control in 2007.
There will be more filibuster ploys on health care and, once that is settled, on issues such as climate control and finance industry regulation.
Where will it end? Probably, it won't.
Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa has suggested a system in which the 60-vote cloture requirement be reduced gradually to a 51-vote simple majority after successive votes on ending debate. But the complexity of getting anything like that done is evident in the name of his co-sponsor when he first proposed it 15 years ago - Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who said then that filibusters were a symbol of what ailed Washington. ...
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