Progressive Hardball

Robert Kuttner
HuffPost

If Democrats can start sounding like Democrats again, they'll have a better shot at holding onto their majority in Congress next November. And if they do keep their majority, they should do two things to turn themselves into a legislative party that can actually do the people's business.

First, scrap the filibuster rule. It isn't written into the Constitution, and in its modern form it only dates to 1975, when the Senate changed the rules to permit a single senator to require a supermajority of 60 votes on a given measure simply by threatening to hold the floor indefinitely, even if the senator couldn't be bothered to show up.

Before that rule change, you actually had to keep talking and tie up the Senate in order to filibuster. Today, you need only to declare your intent to filibuster, and any measure can be made to require 60 votes. As a consequence, the number of filibustered bills every session has risen from around 7 before 1975 to about 100.

And second, dump committee chairmen who are laws unto themselves. One good candidate would be Max Baucus, who just did it again, with a pitiful bipartisan $85 billion "jobs" bill, which is mainly a tax cut bill that will produce scarcely any new jobs. Its proposed $15 billion payroll tax holiday for newly created positions would create precious few new jobs because the incentive is too small. Employers would mainly get a tax break for jobs they planned to fill anyway.

(More here.)