Sigh.

Ezra Klein brings word that the Senate has officially abandoned all pretense of a distinction between a cloture vote and a real one:

Breaking a filibuster is a bit of a time-suck. You have to call a cloture vote, then wait for 30 hours while that cloture vote "ripens." That's fine if you only have to do it every once in awhile, but if it's on every amendment, often multiple times a day? No good.

Recognizing this, Harry Reid struck an agreement with Mitch McConnell: Amendments to the health-care bill would require 60 votes for passage even if there was no filibuster. Orrin Hatch's amendment stripping some of the Medicare, for instance, failed because it only netted 57 votes. John Thune's amendment attacking the CLASS act lost with 51 votes.

Separately, Matthew Yglesias notes that the senate has quickly become the largest obstacle to enacting popular progressive legislation in the United States:

The House of Representatives has already given us a good climate bill and a good universal health care bill. They seem poised to vote out a financial regulatory package quite soon. In the senate, none of those things have happened. They’re closest on health care, but instead of voting on a bill on Monday morning they’ll be doing . . . additional procedural antics more suitable to an elementary school student council goofing off than a crucial public institution of what’s still the world’s leading power.

I can't really blame Reid for caving to the current strain of thinking that assumes 60 votes to be the default necessary majority rather than a recently beefed-up claw hammer in the obstructionist toolkit, but it sure is frustrating. Despite a 60-seat majority in an 100-seat legislative body, 55 of which would vote through the current health care bill in a heartbeat, the Democrats remain at the mercy of a bunch of climate denialists, fearmongering hypocrits, and salivating opportunists from tiny states with small populations and extreme opinions. While I can't envision a scenario in which health care fails and then subsequent major pieces of progressive legislation succeed (ie. if we don't get a health care bill, there will be no cap-and-trade and no financial reform of any consequence), this problem isn't going away once the Senate lumbers on to the next issue. I really don't know how the Democrats will be able to get anything done, ever, without a serious overhaul of the Senate itself.