Concrete changes that could lessen the risk of another debacle like the healthcare reform situation.

[clear eye]

These are things we can and need to do, no matter how difficult, to make the structural changes to begin to turn our ocean liner of a state around.

1. Publicize and lobby Congress to pass the Fair Elections Now Act (FENA), along w/ the following public interest organizations: Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause, Democracy Matters, Public Campaign, Public Citizen, U.S. PIRG, and the Center for American Progress. If enacted this would create a formula that would workably allow a popular candidate to take only small, under-$100 donations and public money to finance the primary and election campaigns.
   
   
2. Call on the Senate leadership to re-instate the rule requiring Senate business to halt for a filibuster. The filibuster was created to allow the minority to use an extraordinary method for allowing reconsideration of legislation that they are so opposed to that they are willing to take the heat of obstructing Senate business to object. The new rule allowing the leadership to suspend a filibuster to go about other business and only have it resume to block a vote on the measure, removes the cost of using it to the initiating party. Then you get the absurd situation where a party can call "Filibuster!" on every useful thing the majority proposes, and the situation is accepted as needing 60 votes instead of a majority for almost everything.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

1. Step 2 might not help much

Republicans would not mind bringing the entire senate to a dead halt. I think the Democrats would fold like a cheap suit (as is the case now)

[clear eye]

2. I think they'd get an attitude adjustment when the MSM started calling them "obstructionists". n/t

[MineralMan]

3. The problem is that changing back to the old rule would require

67 votes, and that's not going to happen. So, it seems they're stuck with their new rule. I don't know when that came into being. I wish it were gone. I want to see old gray-haired GOOPer Senators reading church bulletins into the record for hours. See who has the stamina for that. Not many, I'm thinking.

[clear eye]

4. According to Wikipedia, the switch happened in the 1960s

after southern Senators endlessly obstructed civil rights reforms. That would put it to when Lyndon Johnson was President.

They call the new order "tracking", and it allows more than one bill on the floor at a time as well as suspending the filibuster.

You can't filibuster in the House and some people are calling for an end to it in the Senate, but there are critical issues that Dems need every tool at their disposal to oppose when they are in the minority, such as the right to choose. Eliminating the filibuster altogether might do more harm than good.

I suppose we'd have a much better chance of a rules change on the tracking rule when we are in the minority and the Repukes would think they were putting one over on us.