Sunday, January 24, 2010

The broken Senate

Via Yglesias, a nice chart that demonstrates that the current abuse of the filibuster is historically unprecedented:



Though today's Republicans are really taking it to the next level, I'd say that the use of the filibuster has been problematic since the 1990s. Not coincidentally, there has not been any major tax increase or entitlement reforms (with the possible exception of Clinton's welfare reform) since that time. Those are the politically difficult laws to pass that will simply never get through the Senate so long as the minority party can block it with a mere 41 votes.

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