When they say it appears as though Democrats can't govern they are overlooking the constitutional fact that it takes all parties to govern. Constitutional democracy demands that everyone be involved and everyone play by the rules. Rules are made by grownups though. Kids hate 'em.
We have become a nation of kids -- voters and elected officials alike. We are faced with that reality every day as we watch the current Congress in action.
Ask a kid who just took civics how a bill becomes a law and she'll explain that Congress takes a vote and, if a majority supports the bill, the bill goes to the president. That's what we teach in textbooks, but it's not what we practice in Washington. In reality, the Senate has become a battleground to determine who's better at manipulating the rules. The party that wins gets to decide if a bill becomes a law...... It's not just that you have the 60-vote filibuster process competing against the 51-vote reconciliation process. It's that you have the Senate wasting days and weeks in cloture votes for doomed filibusters and rewriting legislation to conform to the odd limits of reconciliation. And as the minority becomes less responsible with the filibuster (and oh boy, have minority Republicans become less responsible with the filibuster), the majority needs to use reconciliation more often.
Even a kid in civics class would recognize that this is all nuts. The Senate should return to majority rule, or it should decide to raise the threshold to 60 votes. But treating the laws of the body like an arsenal rather than a road map is making the Senate slow, unwieldy and incomprehensible. It's no way to run a country. ...Ezra Klein
The question now comes down to an important choice: America as a failed state or America as a nation of grownups.
