A filibuster plan that only a Republican can love?

Recently, Minnesota’s former Vice-President Walter Mondale and Sen. Amy Klobuchar called for fixing the filibuster. In today’s Washington Post, Ruth Marcus urges liberal Dems to be careful what they wish for regarding changing the Senate’s filibuster rules:

The junior Democratic senators are fed up, understandably so, with the institution's glacial pace. Liberal activists are demanding filibuster reform - now.

They should be careful what they wish for.

The reforms being discussed make complete sense. But they also wouldn't do much to address the fundamental complaint about the filibuster: that it effectively imposes a supermajority requirement for any Senate action. And as a pure matter of partisan politics, these changes could end up causing more problems for Democrats than they would solve, now and in the future. 

But then, wouldn’t it be great if our esteemed senators on both sides of the aisle could sit down together and conduct an intelligent debate about the way to reform the filibuster rules that will best serve the American people - or is that expecting too much maturity from our elected officials?

Read more of Marcus’s column:

Minnesotans Klobuchar and Mondale: fix the filibuster

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (press kit photo).

We Minnesotans value civility and as a result, we’ve produced a few remarkable politicians. Listening first to Sen. Amy Klobuchar this morning on WCCO speak out against the misuse of the filibuster in the US Senate and then reading former Vice President Walter Mondale’s op-ed in today’s NY Times on the same topic would hearten anyone who prefers problem solving to obstruction in our government.

Mondale writes:

Mondale at United Theological Seminary in the Twin Cities in '06.

WE all have hopes for the New Year. Here’s one of mine: filibuster reform. It was around this time 36 years ago — during a different recession — that I was part of a bipartisan effort to reform Senate Rule 22, the cloture rule. At the time, 67 votes were needed to cut off debate and thus end a filibuster, and nothing was getting done. After long negotiations, a compromise lowered to 60 the cloture vote requirement on legislation and nominations. We hoped this moderate change would preserve debate and deliberation while avoiding paralysis, and for a while it did.

But it’s now clear that our reform was insufficient for today’s more partisan, increasingly gridlocked Senate. In 2011, senators should pull back the curtain on Senate obstruction and once again amend the filibuster rules.

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