Ramesh — Thanks a lot. I just wasted precious minutes from my life reading that Eidelson piece on the filibuster. I admit I skimmed it, thinking I would get to the interesting parts and then discovered there were none, so I had to start over.

It seems to me Eidelson is just blowing off all of the actual arguments for and against the filibuster in order to make a case for the filibuster that is irrelevant to the reason for the filibuster. It’s like arguing that under X circumstance shoes make great hammers but in Y situations they don’t — so we should only use shoes as hammers when X describes our predicament.

Where is the acknowledgment that shoes aren’t supposed to be hammers?

Of course the filibuster is undemocratic. This is not some bombshell revelation. And yet in indictment after indictment of the filibuster — and the Senate generally — you hear people level the “undemocratic” charge as if it should be dispositive. The Senate was never intended to be all that democratic. It’s the more republican of the two houses. Its rules and traditions are designed to blunt democratic excesses.

I know everyone knows this, but so many refuse to acknowledge it. They simply glide past the relevant facts about the Senate and insist that everything would be better if the Senate was just a smaller version of the House.

Why haven’t I heard these same liberals argue that Supreme Court justices should be more democratically accountable, too? They’re not elected at all and they have not just filibustery power, but veto-ish (sorry to bust out the technical jargon) power over the whole Congress and presidency. A more “democratic” Supreme Court would (more vigorously) uphold the death penalty, would restrict abortion more and allow all sorts of stuff in the war on terror that liberals oppose. Of course, that misses the point. The assault on the filibuster is really a purely partisan thing. Watching liberals contort themselves to explain why the filibuster and obstructionism generally was great and good and healthy when they did it, but a sign of the end of America when Republicans do it is just unseemly.

Personally, I think the Senate is already too democratic as it is.