| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. I'm seeing a lot of arguments right now about whether Democrats should eliminate the filibuster and move toward a majority-rules U.S. Senate. The main thing to understand about this is that the 60-vote Senate that's been around since 2009 (and, to a lesser extent, since 1993) is unstable. It will not last. Hardly any senators from either party appear interested in restoring the Senate that existed 30 or 40 years ago — a chamber that talked about the rights of individual senators, in which each senator was able to offer amendments and most things were decided by majority votes. Filibusters existed, but plenty of bills, amendments and nominations passed with fewer than 60 votes. That system had a lot going for it. It encouraged compromise, but didn't make passing most bills impossible. It gave narrow constituencies a chance to have their interests heard, because any senator could offer any bill as an amendment. And because amendments were easy to offer, senators would negotiate in order to prevent too many of them from dragging down major legislation. Whether that added up to ideal democracy or not is something that can be debated, but the Senate of the 1970s and 1980s wasn't the older one, where filibusters were used mainly to preserve white supremacy against civil rights majorities. Though the Senate has always been malapportioned, and that can't be justified on any rational basis, and 1970s and 1980s senators were even less demographically diverse than senators now, at least the Senate of that era really did legislate and seemed to do a good job of representing its constituents. Since then, Republicans decided to abuse the rules by establishing a 60-vote threshold for everything, a practice Democrats continued when they were in the majority. Both parties have made it impossible for most senators to offer amendments. Want to save the filibuster in its previous form? That would take a Gang of 30 or more, evenly divided between the two parties, all agreeing to vote to restrict debate on most bills, allowing filibusters only on rare cases, and also demanding more open voting on amendments. But that's not going to happen. At best, maybe there are 10 senators who would make that deal and keep it. Maybe five. Maybe fewer. In part, that's because senators from both parties have become more frightened of tough votes on controversial measures than they are interested in using the legislative process to advanced the interests of constituencies. Yes, the leadership of both parties has made the freewheeling amendment process obsolete, but that wouldn't have happened if individual senators from the majority party opposed it. And in part, it's because important elements of the Republican Party simply oppose compromise in principle, even if it costs them in other ways — and many Republican senators who might otherwise be inclined to compromise are terrified of being labeled RINOs, Republicans in name only. That's what ended the filibuster on nominations in 2013: Republicans could have cut a deal to use the filibuster sparingly and defeat those judicial and executive-branch choices that they strongly objected to, but instead they insisted on a 60-vote threshold for all nominations, giving the Democrats a choice between majority-imposed reform or allowing the minority party to run things. That's the case with the filibuster rules still in place for most legislation. Ten years ago, I used to write about possible ways to adapt Senate rules for an era of partisan polarization. But the problem isn't coming up with rules that can work; it's finding senators who appreciate the strengths of the old Senate and want to revive it. With few if any senators committed to a Senate in which the filibuster makes sense as part of a functional legislative body, it will be gone as soon as short-term incentives line up for eliminating it. That didn't happen in 2009-2010 because Democrats either had 60 seats or very close to it. It didn't happen in 2016-2017 because Republicans had practically no governing agenda. The filibuster may survive for awhile longer in today's 50-50 Senate only because Democratic control is so fragile. Most Democrats would rather pass as much of the party agenda as possible while they have unified government, but for West Virginia's Joe Manchin and others in states where seats will be difficult to defend, becoming the deciding vote on a bunch of bills that may or may not play well at home is a huge risk. Still, even Manchin wants to govern, and during an era of partisan voting, helping the president of one's own party succeed is almost always the best bet for re-election. What's going to determine the outcome? More than likely, it will be, as it was in 2013, just how far Republicans will push them. And with this set of Republicans, that's apt to be pretty far. 1. Kathleen Klaus and Aditi Malik at the Monkey Cage on patterns of political violence and the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. 2. Seth Masket on the post-Trump Republicans. 3. I missed this one last week, but it's a must-bookmark: Daniel Nichanian on the high stakes for criminal justice reform in various 2021 election contests. 4. Marshall Cohen on Trump's 10 most important abuses of power. 5. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Francis Wilkinson on Republicans and the future of U.S. democracy. 6. Jamelle Bouie on the continuing crisis of democracy and the Republican Party. 7. Ariana Pekary writes against panel discussions on cable news networks. 8. And Sarah Lyall on how scholars will rank Trump among presidents. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
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