Via ThinkProgress, if you've been thinking lately we have a do-nothing Congress, and particularly Senate, you're right. They're not doing anything has set a recent record:
How's this happening? The broken Senate procedural rules.
But the Senate’s concept of “debate” bears little resemblance to the notion of an exchange of competing viewpoints intended to convince senators of the rightness of one side or another. Rather, the iconic image of a modern senate debate is a single senator speaking to an almost entirely empty chamber. As Sen.Tom Udall (D-NM) recently told the New Yorker’s George Packer, “a senator typically gives ‘a prepared speech that’s already been vetted through the staff. Then another guy gets up and gives a speech on a completely different subject.’”
Nor does debate end after 60 senators agree to break a filibuster—a process known as “cloture” in the arcane language of the Senate. Unless the senators unanimously consent to holding a vote immediately, dissenting senators may demand up to 30 hours of post-cloture debate before a vote can actually take place, and they can prevent the Senate from considering any other business during these hours of delay.
Thirty hours may not seem like a lot, but when you consider the sheer number of confirmations, bills, and appropriations that the Senate must consider just to keep the country running, the ability to waste 30 hours before any one of these tasks can be accomplished empowers the dissenters to prevent more than a fraction of the Senate’s business from ever being completed.
It's a remarkably effective means for the GOP to take their hostages; witness the Warren/CFPB situation.
Writing at the Plum Line blog, Jonathon Bernstein says it's time for Harry Reid to "go nuclear" on the Republicans.
Democrats have responded by…well, I have no idea. I’m hearing minimal, if any, howls of outrage; I’m not seeing Obama elevate the issue. Mostly, what I hear is resigned frustration. They seem to be acting as if 60 votes for all nominations is just the normal way the Senate conducts business. It isn’t....
What Reid and the Democrats should be doing is threatening dramatic action: eliminating supermajority rules for executive branch confirmation. The truth is they should probably threaten to just get rid of filibusters altogether. But that’s a tall order. For now, it should be doable to get every Democrat to support making it possible to confirm executive branch nominations with a simple majority of Senators. Doing so would simply return the Senate to how it was governed throughout its history up until the Obama presidency. Dems would simply be threatening to restore the old norm that while the Senate could influence policy, the president was, barring exceptional circumstances, entitled to the person he wanted to carry out that policy....
It'd at least be a start.
I’m not a fan of the common liberal critique that Democrats would win more battles if only they had more backbone. If the votes aren’t there, you can be as tough as you want and it won’t do much good. But in this case, it rings true. Harry Reid may or may not really have the votes to turn the Senate into a majority-run institution for everything — but he certainly should have the votes to do so on executive branch nominations. Going nuclear on those should be a credible threat. It can be explained as a return to true Senate tradition. And if the threat isn’t enough, Reid should pull the trigger.