If you're lucky, you'll never find this interesting.
But the filibuster has become a very real problem; the Republicans have been abusing this stall tactic like Dean Smith abused the Four Corners Offense, running out the clock on Congress to preserve the status quo. In the 1982 ACC Championship game against Virginia, the Tar Heels spread the floor and held the ball for most of the last 13 minutes of the game, this was good for the Heels since they were protecting a lead, but bad for basketball, as fans were bored to death; as a result the ACC instituted the shot clock the following year. Pundits are now wondering why the Democrats don't institute a similar rule change, and save the government from the filibuster before people drop dead.
The teams scored a combined 13 points over the last 13 minutes; before the rule changes, this was an intelligent use of Michael Jordan.
The filibuster is a joke of a stall tactic: a Senator goes up and pretends to give a speech, and in order to get him to stop, 60 out of 100 Senators have to tell him to shut the fuck up, otherwise, as long as he's talking, the Senate can't pass any legislation, and the stalling can go on for years. The Republican threats to use this loophole have gone completely out of control, to the point where Democrats are contemplating something called the Nuclear Option.
This is what it takes to shut them up.
The Nuclear Option isn't as radical as it sounds, if the Democrats can get 50 Senators (plus Joe Biden as a tiebreak) to declare the filibuster unconstitutional, the effective threshold for passage of a bill will drop from 60 to 50. This would be great for the Democrats in the short term, since they have 59 votes right now; and arguably also in the long term, since the filibuster, by preventing any new law, preserves the conservative status quo over any progressive change.
When pundits are asked why the Democrats haven't gone nuclear yet, the typical answer is that the Democrats are pussies, and while this is accurate, its also incomplete; liberal ideology does tend to attract a specific type of person, and its worth delving into the details of these predispositions.
Democrats defend minority rights, even minorities other than themselves; Republicans support only their own rights, often at the expense of others.
For years, Democrats have defended, while Conservatives have attacked, the rights of racial, religious, and sexual minorities. Many Conservatives like to say the white christian male is an endangered species, and while that isn't exactly the case, in the Senate today, the Conservative is definitely a minority; oddly, or perhaps predictably, the Democrats are overprotective of these white-male minorities' rights. If the roles were reversed, and the Republicans had 59 votes, you'd bet they'd try to make the Democrats a permanent slave race.
Democrats believe in helping the less fortunate, Republicans don't care about the less fortunate, only about themselves and their families:
Democrats support programs like universal health care and welfare; Republicans find this naive, they believe the less fortunate will take advantage of the system. Put in the position of being less fortunate, the Republican Senators are definitely exploiting the system, and Democratic naivite.
The Democrats believe in checks and balances; Republicans only believe in them when convenient:
When Bush was president, the GOP advanced the idea of the unitary executive, saying that the President should have almost total control over every decision made by the government. Anytime Congress passed a law that Bush didn't like, he used the signing statement loophole to cross out the parts he disagreed with, circumventing the separation of powers. Signing statements are meant to be used only when part of a law is unconstitutional; Bush considered anything he didn't like to be an unconstitutional usurption of his presidential powers. According to the NYTimes, he used "signing statements to challenge about 1,200 sections of bills over his eight years in office, about twice the number challenged by all previous presidents combined." Given the same opportunity, Obama has used signing statements in a much more limited fashion, which is in keeping with a campaign promise, although he was predictably taken to task by Conservatives after issuing a few of them last year.
In 2005, in a GOP-controlled Senate, the Democrats threatened to filibuster some of Bush's judicial nominees; in response, the GOP threatened to eliminate the filibuster using the Nuclear Option, and the Democrats promptly caved. Thus far, given the same opportunity, the Democrats have failed to issue similar Nuclear threats.
It's not the end of the world if all we're nuking is a legal loophole.
Its true that the Democratic character traits outlined above are pretty much just variations on a theme; the Democrats are indeed pussies, who's (perhaps naive) belief in the common good exposes them to exploitation by Republicans, and maybe that explains why they've thus far failed to strike down the filibuster. But its also possible that the failure has been intentional, that its in the service of a fourth predisposition, that being that Democrats feel the need to support their actions with logic and evidence. For a year, they've tried everything they could to pass health care, but due to the pigheadedness of the GOP and the intractability of the filibuster, America's been deprived of the reform it needs. Obama's a constitutional law professor, the failures of the previous year have now provided him with the evidence, and a practical argument, for why the filibuster should be declared unconstitutional and eliminated for good.
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