On the political future of the US of A.
I've been working on a long, detailed post about filibusters, and how they are paralyzing the government and how they are a quirk of the rules, and yada yada yada. Maybe I'll still get around to posting it at some point. It occurred to me today that it's all OK, though. Even if nothing passes unless one party has 60 votes in the Senate, the Democrats still win. Every decade or two there is a period of a year or two when the Dems have a filibuster-proof majority. The need to bribe *everybody* to agree to a bill is still pretty crippling, but progress can be made. The Republicans haven't had a filibuster-proof majority since 1922. At this point, the liberal wing of the Democratic party alone is strong enough to filibuster the Republicans. No piece of Republican legislation need ever pass again.
So legislation only gets passed every 20 years, and it's relatively lousy legislation, and the House has to change its rules to be more adaptive to the Senate's brief periods of function, and the US probably ceases to be a superpower. But the Republicans still lose. Deal with it, suckers.
So legislation only gets passed every 20 years, and it's relatively lousy legislation, and the House has to change its rules to be more adaptive to the Senate's brief periods of function, and the US probably ceases to be a superpower. But the Republicans still lose. Deal with it, suckers.