In the wake of the 2010 midterms and the Republican takeover of the House, should filibuster reform go forward in the Senate? Yes it should.
There will no doubt be calls among the Senate Democratic caucus to regroup and reassess both the wisdom of and prospects for reform, naturally. But I think the answer ought to be that reform goes forward, regardless, and is in fact arguably made more important by the results in the House.
Yes, the initial objection will be that the filibuster might be necessary in order to block the enactment of the craziest initiatives of a runaway reactionary majority in the House. But there's another tool available for stopping that, and it's called having the majority in the Senate. The veto is there, too, but the first line of defense is marshaling a Democratic majority to actually defeat bad policy.
More than that, if the Senate is going to function as a body -- and since Democrats still hold the majority there, they might consider it a good thing if it also functioned -- there's going to have to be reform. It would be a tremendous mistake, I think, for Democrats to surrender their ability to use the house they still control because they lost control of the other one. The Senate can't just sit there unused for two years. Especially if there's going to have any hope of Democrats winning anything in the next election. Only one of the houses of Congress is going to be capable of formulating the Democratic legislative policy agenda and putting it before the public heading into 2012. But that capability is, as we all know, too easily hamstrung under the current rules. Without reform, the filibuster renders it a nullity.
Yes, the House will send the Senate bad legislation over the next two years. So what? Don't pass it in the Senate. Don't even bring it to the floor. That's still the prerogative of the majority in the Senate. And more than that, pass good Democratic legislation and send that to the table. If the Senate is used as nothing but a filibustering backstop for the next two years, I don't see how Democrats make any argument to win the next election. The Republicans may be able to win on the "Party of No" platform, but I don't think that's equally true for both parties. Certainly not while Democrats still hold the Senate and the White House and everybody knows it.
When the House passes bad legislation, ignore it. Pass a Democratic bill in its place, and put that up as an alternative. It may well be that neither side is able to ultimately pass anything. True, that's the same result you'll get if the filibuster stays in place and the Senate simply blocks everything. But with the filibuster still functioning as it currently does, there won't even be an the opportunity to pass Democratic alternatives and put the ball back in the Republican House's court. Democrats will filibuster Republican bills coming from the House, and Republicans will filibuster Democratic bills originating in the Senate. But the Republican House will come out as the one with the record of passage. Democrats won't have a counter unless they can actually force votes. And that's simply not possible unless the filibuster is reformed.