Rule change

The Senate minority filibuster has emerged as the last speed bump in the path of President Barack Obama's costly, left-wing legislative agenda.

The threat of filibusters has become so common from a unified GOP opposition that congressional leaders now take it for granted no bill of consequence will pass the 100-member Senate with a simple majority. Instead, 60 votes -- the number needed to cut off a filibuster -- has become the minimum required.

To prevail over Republicans, all 58 Democrats have to stick together, along with the Senate's two "independents."

Mr. Obama's Senate allies have been hard-pressed to round up 60 votes to enact enormous new carbon taxes, supposedly to fight "man-made global warming." (Thank heavens.) And frustration has intensified following Senate Republicans' no-holds-barred effort to block the ongoing federal takeover of the medical industry.

So some Democrats are seeking to change the rules. Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., has launched a petition urging Sen. Reid, D-Nev., to push for cutting from 60 to 55 the number of votes needed to cut off a filibuster. Other proposals would gradually reduce the number of votes needed to cut off debate -- from 60 votes on the first attempt, to 57 two days later, dropping eventually to 51 votes if debate drags on.

This is all mighty amusing. Didn't the Democrats fall all over themselves defending the filibuster when they were busy running it into the ground in an effort to block George W. Bush's judicial nominees? None other than Sen. Reid took to the Senate floor in 2007 to passionately challenge a GOP plan to modify filibuster rules in order to hamper Democratic opposition. "If Republicans roll back our rights in this chamber, there will be no check on their power," Sen. Reid said in his speech. "And not just on judges. Their power will be unchecked on Supreme Court nominees, the president's nominees in general ... and legislation like Social Security privatization."

Yet today, Sen. Reid is the majority leader and complains bitterly about GOP delaying tactics.

Frustrated liberals say that Senate rules are a relic of another era, hobbling Congress' ability to address the nation's problems. Well, given that all of government's kleptocratic "anti-recession" measures to date have made things worse -- just as they did from 1930 to 1939 -- is that really so bad?

Yes, the filibuster is a relic from another era -- the era of the Founding Fathers, who promised us a central government of sharply limited powers. Until 1917, the Senate did not place any limits on debate, at all.

The very purpose of the Senate was and is to slow down hot-headed and ill-considered legislation, even if it has the temporary support of the mob.

The federal takeover of American medicine lacks even that temporary support -- two-thirds of Americans are properly scared to death of a vast new government "health" bureaucracy they will neither be able to afford nor control, a scheme now being pushed by a lame-duck cabal of 60 senators who surely know their supermajority will expire in a year.

While the damage they do ... could last a century.