Reid and McConnell agree: There will be no reform of the filibuster

Just another ploy to be dysfunctional junction, ridiculous.  I am sooooooooo disappointed. We will always have filibusters by the republicans when it does not go their way.  I am so tired of the same old same old, what happened to bipartisanship,  IT SAILED AWAY WITH THE TITANIC....AND SUnk.
And for Reid to sort of hand shake not to use ‘constitutional option’ which most Democrats wanted..... infuriates me and I want to scream........ 

me me me me
mine mine mine mine
you can't have it
don't touch my filibuster.

IDEA: you know what we should do is put them all in Sumo outfits and give them nerf bats and let them bang at each other and the winner is.......

I like this Comment and probably explains to dummies like me how the Senate acts....he is a republican unfortunately.  

Au contraire, you Constitutionally-illiterate and ignorant whiners. The Senate is not dysfunctional; it is operating precisely as the Founders intended, namely, to achieve consensus, i.e., more than simple majority rule, for legislation to pass.
The Founders intended for the Senate to be the "graveyard of legislation" - the "saucer that cools the coffee" in Washington's words - as a counter to the House, which they knew, as the People's body, would react often to the immediate will of the voters, but not necessarily with due consideration of the wisdom of its proposals.
You seem to have forgotten that the Founders intended the Senate to represent the States, not the "People" -- again, which was intended to be the People's body.
Thanks to the disastrous "Progressive" era that gave us the Fed and the income tax, we also got the 17th Amendment providing for the direct election of senators. This misguided step to turn the Senate into another "People's" body makes the filibuster even more important.
When Repubs regain control of the Senate in 2012, you will be grateful that the grownups retained the filibuster.
Finally, we should go back to requiring 2/3 of Senators to invoke cloture to cut off debate. Three-fifths is not enough!

Posted by: RobBrantley | January 27, 2011 2:55 PM | 

By Ezra Klein

A few moments ago, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell took to the floor of the Senate to announce an agreement on rules reform. But the meat of the agreement was not on which rules will be reformed. It was on the process by which rules can be reformed: Reid and McConnell agreed that the rules cannot -- or at least should not -- be changed by majority vote.

"As part of this compromise," Reid said, "we've agreed that I won't force a majority vote to fundamentally change the Senate -- that is the so-called ‘constitutional option’ -- and he [McConnell] won't in the future." In other words, Reid and McConnell have agreed that the Senate's rules will not be decided by a 51-vote majority. That was what theconstitutional option was about, and that's what Reid explicitly rejected in his speech. "Both McConnell and Reid feared what would happen if they were in the minority," explains a Reid aide.

This agreement is merely a handshake, of course. Either Reid or McConnell could turn around and change the rules with 51-votes at some future date. But note the tone Reid is taking: It's not that he'd prefer not to use the constitutional option at some future date, or that he won't do so as long as the Republicans don't abuse the rules. It's that he simply won't. The long-term effort to reform the filibuster didn't take an incremental step forward today. The minority is not on notice that further abuse could lead to more significant reforms. Rather, Reid and the Democrats agreed that the only way to free the Senate from needing a supermajority to get anything done is to muster an even larger supermajority to change the rules. That is to say, both parties have codified the supermajority requirement.

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 offbecause 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.

Photo credit: By Alex Brandon/Associated Press

By Ezra Klein  | January 27, 2011; 1:36 PM ET