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By AndrewHyman Posted in Senate Rules — Comments () / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Andres Martinez has an excellent op/ed piece titled "Filibuster Doubletalk" in the LA Times. The whole thing's good, so I can't pick out a best excerpt; I'll just quote his first and last paragraphs:

The NAACP is lobbying to preserve the Senate's filibuster in Washington these days. What's next for the civil rights group? A campaign encouraging Southern pride in the Confederate flag? A fundraising drive to build more of those odious monuments to Robert E. Lee?
....
The filibuster goes too far in upsetting the balance struck by the Constitution and empowering an obstructionist minority. Surely the founders didn't intend for the Senate's "advice and consent" review of presidential nominees to require a supermajority.

Of course they didn't. See, for example, Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Number 66: "[I]t could hardly happen, that the majority of the Senate would feel any other complacency towards the object of an appointment than such as the appearances of merit might inspire, and the proofs of the want of it destroy."