| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Forcing senators to give marathon orations to carry out a filibuster is a bad idea, but it looks like it may be a bad idea whose time has come, with President Joe Biden endorsing the "talking filibuster" in an ABC News interview. Why? Because most Democrats want to eliminate the filibuster, and Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia — the most moderate Democrat in the Senate — has said that while he absolutely won't vote to eliminate the filibuster, he's open to going the "talking" route. And so that's what's we're going to talk about. Because what happens with Senate procedures over the next few months is going to determine whether Democrats pass a lot of their remaining agenda or very little of it. Right now, legislative filibusters in the Senate are silent, and are usually defeated only by voting for "cloture" — that is, to end debate. That requires 60 senators, an almost impossible level of support to achieve in a partisan 50-50 Senate on pretty much any Democratic bill. The idea of talking filibusters would be to bring back an old way to defeat filibusters: attrition. That is, force the minority blocking a vote to do something unpleasant or difficult, in the hope that it would eventually give up. Here's the problem: Whether attrition would be realistic depends on the specific procedures involved. And this gets to why talking filibusters are a lousy solution. Procedures that would make it easy to perform talking filibusters wouldn't deter them and would backfire on the majority, which wants to use scarce Senate time to pass the things it does have the votes for. Procedures that would make it hard to filibuster could make attrition work, but if a majority were willing to enforce them then it would really just be eliminating the filibuster. If it had the votes for that, then why go through a charade of pretending to keep the tradition in place? Oh, and for those who think that the minority would only be willing to employ a somewhat costly filibuster for the bills it strongly dislikes? I doubt it. If new procedures still give the minority a chance to delay indefinitely, they'll create a strong incentive to use it the first time possible just to make the point that nothing has changed, and that only a 60-senator majority can pass anything. So why bother? It's all about Manchin. Presumably, he prefers the status quo to a world in which he is the swing voter on bill after bill after bill. That makes some sense. He's still going to be the swing voter on votes that require only a simple majority, like nominations and certain budget-related bills, which gives him a lot of power to extract stuff for West Virginia. And having all the attention on his every move on every controversial bill may strike him as electorally perilous. At least, it makes sense as long as he doesn't mind seeing lots of bills defeated by filibuster, either because he's against them or because he's only a mild supporter. But my guess is that the more the Senate remains a chamber subject to minority-party rule, the more other Democrats are going to look for some way out. So it makes sense for Democrats who want to legislate by simple majority to indulge Manchin, even if nothing changes at first; eventually, they're likely to believe, he'll realize that under current conditions he'll have to choose between Democrats or Republicans running the Senate. What no one should be particularly worried about is Republican leader Mitch McConnell's threat to retaliate if Democrats do eventually "go nuclear" and eliminate the filibuster. McConnell spent time on the Senate floor Tuesday making those threats, but the congressional scholar Matt Glassman was correct when he explained on Twitter that any Senate majority willing to disable one form of minority-party obstruction would be willing to act against other forms of obstruction that were serious enough to prevent the chamber from operating. Instead of making empty threats, if McConnell really wanted to preserve the filibuster he would cut back on its use. He'd let Democrats bring some bills to the Senate floor without any need for a cloture vote, meaning that they would only need a simple majority to pass, which after all is what Senate rules require. That happened all the time before 2009. Indeed, if McConnell demanded making it easier to offer amendments in exchange for minority self-restraint, a lot of reformers might urge Democrats to take that deal. And McConnell's Republicans could still have the filibuster reserved for the occasional bill they strongly oppose. Instead, we get things like pointless filibusters of executive-branch nominees (where only a majority is needed for cloture, anyway), intended only to delay for delay's sake. Indeed, this week Republicans mounted a filibuster against confirmation of Biden's nominee for U.S. trade representative, Katherine Tai, whom they don't even oppose. The cloture vote was approved, 98 to 0. This is exactly the kind of thing that has pushed most of the Democratic Party to favor eliminating the filibuster, and might still push Manchin and other reluctant Democrats to join them. If it happens, the credit or blame should go to Senate Republicans. Especially Mitch McConnell. 1. John A. Dearborn, Desmond S. King and Stephen Skowronek have a must-read on the Congress and the post-Trump presidency. 2. Erica Borghard and Jacquelyn Schneider at the Monkey Cage on the SolarWinds hack. 3. Rick Hasen on the Democrats' plans on voting rights. 4. Dan Drezner on Trump and presidential power. 5. Perry Bacon Jr. on the ideas behind a growing portion of the Democratic Party. 6. Kevin Drum on how the U.S. differed from other Western countries in dealing with the pandemic. 7. Reid Wilson on what Africa is getting right. 8. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Peter R. Orszag on climate and Europe. 9. Philip Klein on the role of public health advice. 10. And Eleanor Holmes Norton — in National Review! — on taking down the fences on Capitol Hill. 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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