Guess what? Harry Reid and the feckless Senate Democrats caved on fiibuster reform. A necessary move to un-paralyze government has been shrugged off. Who'd a thunk?Why? The excuse given is that Democrats will want it back when they are in the minority. Maybe that's about 10% of it. The other 90% is explained by Scott Lemieux:
The larger problem, however, is that even for senators who understand the history of the filibuster and its inherently reactionary effects, the filibuster represents a disjuncture between the interests of progressives as a whole and the individual interests of Democratic senators. Collectively, the filibuster makes it harder to advance policy goals. But on an individual level, the filibuster and the Senate’s other arcane minority-empowering procedures give senators far more power than ordinary members of a typical Democratic legislature (including the House of Representatives). This helps to explain why even relatively liberal senior members tend to be more reluctant to abandon the filibuster than newer Democratic senators; once you get used to power, it’s hard to give it up.
Our contemporary senators are true to senatorial form. Like the senators of the late Roman Republic, the prevailing ethos in the U.S. Senate is "Let the country go to hell, so long as my interests are promoted."
Put this side by side with the Amgen scandal that the New York Times broke in which Democrat Max Baucus (remember him from the ACA drama?) and Republicans Orrin Hatch and Mitch McConnell, and it reinforces your worst stereotypes about how the Senate operates.