Paul Krugman:
Unless some legislator pulls off a last-minute double-cross, health care reform will pass the Senate this week. Count me among those who consider this an awesome achievement. It’s a seriously flawed bill, we’ll spend years if not decades fixing it, but it’s nonetheless a huge step forward.
It was, however, a close-run thing. And the fact that it was such a close thing shows that the Senate — and, therefore, the U.S. government as a whole — has become ominously dysfunctional.
After all, Democrats won big last year, running on a platform that put health reform front and center. In any other advanced democracy this would have given them the mandate and the ability to make major changes. But the need for 60 votes to cut off Senate debate and end a filibuster — a requirement that appears nowhere in the Constitution, but is simply a self-imposed rule — turned what should have been a straightforward piece of legislating into a nail-biter. And it gave a handful of wavering senators extraordinary power to shape the bill.
Now consider what lies ahead. We need fundamental financial reform. We need to deal with climate change. We need to deal with our long-run budget deficit. What are the chances that we can do all that — or, I’m tempted to say, any of it — if doing anything requires 60 votes in a deeply polarized Senate?
Krugman points to a decades-old proposal -- by Tom Harkin and Joe Lieberman of all people -- that would allow a minority of senators to delay, but not ultimately defeat, legislation.
Sixty votes would still be needed to end a filibuster at the beginning of debate, but if that vote failed, another vote could be held a couple of days later requiring only 57 senators, then another, and eventually a simple majority could end debate. Mr. Harkin says that he’s considering reintroducing that proposal, and he should.
But if such legislation is itself blocked by a filibuster — which it almost surely would be — reformers should turn to other options. Remember, the Constitution sets up the Senate as a body with majority — not supermajority — rule. So the rule of 60 can be changed. A Congressional Research Service report from 2005, when a Republican majority was threatening to abolish the filibuster so it could push through Bush judicial nominees, suggests several ways this could happen — for example, through a majority vote changing Senate rules on the first day of a new session.
Obviously, if such a rule were in place for this Congress, the Senate health care bill could have been much stronger. Whether it would have been much stronger is something we will probably never know, but if Majority Leader Reid and President Obama were to embrace this idea, they'd be putting themselves behind the kind of change our system of government desperately needs.
Assuming Republicans continue their filibuster, we're going to end up having to more procedural votes over the next 90 hours, both to advance the same underlying legislation that moved forward last night. The fact that the GOP filibuster is fully within Senate rules, giving a Senator from Connecticut and a Senator from Nebraska effective veto power of the legislation, is all the proof you need that the Senate is, as Krugman says, dysfunctional. It's time to fix it.