Will Reid finally force a genuine, actual filibuster?

Democrats in the U.S. Senate have talked from time to time about forcing Republicans, who invoke filibuster with regularity and without consequence, to filibuster for real.

They've pondered dispensing with the courtesy by which they accede to the existence of a filibuster, meaning an issue can't be brought to a vote without cloture achieved by 60 votes. Meantime, they proceed to let the Senate operate with business as usual without actually requiring the Republicans to engage genuinely in the filibuster.

A genuine filibuster would mean unlimited and uninterrupted floor debate, with cots brought in for the evenings, and with nothing else getting done as long as the Republicans were required actually to hold forth.

It was good cinema when Jimmy Stewart did it, but there are perils in the real world.

Voters could view it a couple of ways, one of which is as silliness for which the Democrats conceivably could be deemed as responsible as the Republicans, or even more.

Majority Leader Harry Reid's liberal flank has sometimes urged him to call Republicans' bluff on a filibuster. He has weighed the complications and consequences and declined.

But only lately have I heard any suggestion that the Democrats might call such a bluff against their own, meaning four senators balking on a public option in the health care reform bill. Those would be three centrist Democrats -- Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana -- and independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.

Bernie Sanders, the socialist-inclined senator from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats, has talked about requiring a real filibuster. Then Pulitzer Prize-winning business columnist Steven Pearlstein suggested it last week in a little essay in The Washington Post.

Pearlstein complained that filibusters were allowed to proliferate by their mere threat, rather than their actual exercise, during which time senators reinforced the tactic by working behind closed doors on compromises to forge 60 votes and advance what he called the tyranny of the minority.

But he asked: What if, on health care, they simply said, OK, filibuster if you must, all you Republicans and our four Democratic caucus friends?

It can't happen. Surely. If you've never had the nerve to call a bluff on Republicans, why would you finally find the nerve against four colleagues in your own caucus?

But it does provide a backdrop for Reid's more palatable option, which could be dramatic enough.

He could do the usual, which is hold his health care measure, with its opt-out public option and its apparent tax on high incomes, in abeyance while he worked privately with the four balking centrists of his party to see what they would accept -- a trigger of a public option, probably -- and with his liberal base to see how far it was willing to retreat.

Or, because he needs to oblige his liberal flank by seeming to do everything he can for the public option before abandoning it, he could force his four caucus members actually to do what they don't want to be forced to do. That is to vote openly with Republicans for a filibuster, heaping MoveOn.org's considerable ridicule down on them.

Only after that exercise might Reid advance to the inevitable stage of hammering out a middle ground, probably, again, a trigger.

Since the result is the same either way, and since all of this will get settled behind closed doors in a House-Senate conference committee anyway, I doubt Reid would enforce such an affront to the balking four.

But the pressure for uncompromising purity from the left against Democrats is getting almost as intense as the pressure for uncompromising purity from the right on Republicans.

John Brummett (jbrummett@arkansasnews.com) is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock.