Think about it. Who wins and who loses when you play the chessboard out a few moves?
Go back to the 60's. Back then, it was Mr. Smith Goes to Washington rules, and the bill that was getting filibustered was the Civil Rights Act.
Back then, it only took one senator to hold the floor in a filibuster, equipped with a dictionary and a catheter, and prepared to talk the bill down for as long as he can. That senator can, of course, give the floor to another senator. The Dixiecrats that filibustered the Civil Rights Act and similar legislation had a rotation set up. Two Dixiecrats were in Washington for 24 hours. One would filibuster for 12 hours, then pass the floor to the next one for 12 hours. Another pair would fly up to relieve them for the next day. And so it would continue - only two Dixiecrats filibustering per day in a planned rotation that they can keep up indefinitely, while the rest of them were at home in their states, sipping mint juleps. Of course, the filibustering senators would be making constant quorum calls (Remember, the magic words of a filibuster are "I suggest the absence of a quorum." which forces a roll call, which would result in adjournment if 51 senators didn't answer the call), so to keep the Senate from shutting down entirely, the good Democrats and the Republicans voting with them would have to be in Washington, camped out in their offices, ready to answer quorum calls 24/7.
Usually, the Dixiecrats won, because they could sip mint juleps while the majority had to live in the Capitol 24/7 answering 3am quorum calls. Civil rights legislation got kicked down the road over and over and over.
What we want is something where the filibusterer, and the majority getting filibustered, actually have a roughly even chance of winning, meaning neither side gets too much of an advantage in terms of being able to out-endure the other, and that the winning side has to earn their victory. Remember that down the road, the Republicans may get the majority, and we might be the ones filibustering when they're doing things like putting nazi assclowns in the Supreme Court, ramming through yet more violations of our constitutional rights, or crushing unions and slashing Medicare & Social Security, etc.
There are lots of proposals to reform the filibuster. Right now, the filibustering side has too much of an advantage - the senator doesn't even have to do the Mr. Smith thing - he just puts a hold on the bill and flies home for mint juleps. Without 60 votes for cloture, the bill is vetoed.
Maybe the suggestion of requiring 41 votes to sustain a filibuster (in other words, all 41+ members who wish to sustain a filibuster) to show up to quorum calls would be useful.
Here's another one: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/25/the-british-model-for-filibuster-reform.html - a sustained filibuster results in a bill being taken off the table for one, and only one election cycle. They can kill a bill for two years, but that bill is automatically put back on the floor for the session that starts immediately after the next election, and at that point, can no longer be filibustered. So if we filibuster a GOP bill that axes Social Security, we can go to the voters and say "Yes, we saved Social Security by filibustering the Senate bill that sends your checks to the Koch brothers." The voters, then, have the final say, in the form of throwing out the bastards and retaining the cool senators, which would alter the way the Senate votes on the bill when it comes up the January after the election. If the GOP, OTOH, filibusters a bill that would put the banksters in jail that defrauded billions from the people and caused the Great Recession, I'd like to see how they explain that to their constituents...
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senators - Feinstein and Levin in particular, who weren't going to support filibuster reform.
