I may not explain this well, but i need to get this out there.
We have a House of Representatives (meditate on that for a second, because the Senate is definitely not a representative, democratic institution).
A strong health care reform bill should be created there. Such a contentious bill is best handled by a body that accurately reflects our country politically (as opposed to the Senate, which gives two votes to Wyoming and two to New York... absurd).
Then send it to the Senate in a coordinated effort in which The 56 or 57 Senators in favor of health care reform agree not to garble it up but instead attempt to bring it to a vote.
Republicans will filibuster.
Democrats will vote for cloture. They won't get it. continue in this effort daily until it shuts down Washington.
Expose the inanity. Invite the media to cover every moment of this so-called filibuster. Explain in a concerted campaign that in the greatest democracy in the world, the elected members cannot even vote on health care. Explain that it wasn't defeated, in fact, it has the support of the majority of the Senate, but a few Senators - Max Baucus, Kent Conrad and Ben Nelson... say their names everyday - who are free to vote no on the bill have dubbed themselves the kings of America. They are preventing democracy. They are exercising a veto. They will be hard pressed to explain how their actions can be called "representing their constituents".
Nowadays we talk about how frustrating these blue dogs are, that they are DINOs. I think we've got it all wrong. I don't care if they vote for the bill. They have every right to represent their constituencies, but they only have the right to represent their constituencies. They have no right to usurp democracy.
It might seem politically foolish, but I think it is the only way to reclaim the senate from the filibuster machine it has become only recently. In any other era a filibuster wouldn't even be talked about with a bill so overwhelmingly supported by the most recent elections. The senate, a flawed barometer of our nation's electorate even without the filibuster, puts our nation in great peril as we carom into the unforgiving dilemmas of a modern world. Especially so, now that the filibuster has become a lazy and accepted political tool for hog-willed minorities.
Many people claim that the Senate and it's granting of equal suffrage was due to the wisdom of our forefathers. Facts would disagree:
James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution," openly admitted that the equal suffrage in the Senate was a compromise, a "lesser evil," and not born out of any political theory. "[I]t is superfluous to try, by the standard of theory, a part of the Constitution which is allowed on all hands to be the result, not of theory, but ‘of a spirit of amity, and that mutual deference and concession which the peculiarity of our political situation rendered indispensable.’"
Since 1789, the Senate has become much more malaportioned. At the time of the Connecticut Compromise, the largest state, Virginia, had only twelve times the population of the smallest state, Delaware. Today, the largest state, California, has a population that is seventy times greater than the population of the smallest state, Wyoming. In 1790, it would take a theoretical 30% of the population to elect a majority of the Senate, today it would take 17%. Today, there are seven states with only one Congressman (Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming); at no time in the past has there been as high a proportion of one-Congressmen states.