Congressional expert Norm Ornstein's has a nice article arguing that the Senate is an increasingly broken and incapable institution. It's anchored by this graph tracking the rise in filibusters over time.
If you want to understand why the earth is likely to heat and why comprehensive health reform is unlikely to pass and why the government is increasingly letting the Federal Reserve govern its response to the financial crisis, that graph basically tells the story. I'd take issue with Ornstein on one point: He argues that "the problems here are less the rules and more the culture. And that is not going to change anytime soon." But that's fatalism. Imagine a classroom in which all the children are polite and they can talk whenever they wish. Now imagine that order breaks down, the children grow rude and combative, and the classroom devolves into cacophony. You wouldn't say that we need to wait for the children to be polite again. You'd say we need to change the rules so they're responsive to the behavior of the participants.So too with the filibuster. As Ornstein says, the culture has changed such that formal methods of obstruction have become common tactics of the minority. The answer is not to wait until the culture reverts. it's to recognize that the rules are no longer suitable to the institution.
If you want to understand why the earth is likely to heat and why comprehensive health reform is unlikely to pass and why the government is increasingly letting the Federal Reserve govern its response to the financial crisis, that graph basically tells the story. I'd take issue with Ornstein on one point: He argues that "the problems here are less the rules and more the culture. And that is not going to change anytime soon." But that's fatalism. Imagine a classroom in which all the children are polite and they can talk whenever they wish. Now imagine that order breaks down, the children grow rude and combative, and the classroom devolves into cacophony. You wouldn't say that we need to wait for the children to be polite again. You'd say we need to change the rules so they're responsive to the behavior of the participants.So too with the filibuster. As Ornstein says, the culture has changed such that formal methods of obstruction have become common tactics of the minority. The answer is not to wait until the culture reverts. it's to recognize that the rules are no longer suitable to the institution. 
