Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times ran a story on its front page about grumblings from Democrats to end the Senate filibuster. But the article is basically a compendium of older initiatives, like Alan Grayson’s petition to lower the threshold for the filibuster to 55, or Tom Harkin’s bill to gradually lower the filibuster threshold on successive votes. There’s not a lot that’s new in the article.

There is something new today, however. Jonathan Tasini, a Democratic Senate candidate in New York State who is running against Kirsten Gillibrand (and possibly Harold Ford), has created a website where he calls for an end to the filibuster. He is clearly seeking to use the site as an organizing tool.

The filibuster is undemocratic and contradicts the core principle that legislation should become law by majority vote. The mere threat of a filibuster can bring the business of the Senate and the American people to a halt.

The filibuster allows a minority of 41 Senators to block the will of 59 Senators. Even when 60 Senators support a bill, the 60th Senator can hold the bill hostage to individual demands that can warp important legislation.

We call on every candidate for Senate in 2010, and every Senator who will continue to serve in the 112th Congress, to pledge to vote, on the first legislative day in 2011, to change the Senate’s rules to eliminate the filibuster.

In a statement, Tasini cites the stalemate on health care reform, which he says “ran into a brick wall of opposition by four Senators: Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, and Mary Landrieu,” as the impetus for this campaign. He calls the filibuster “no longer the exception on matters of deep principle; since Democrats won back the Senate in 2007, it has become a routine method of blocking the will of the majority of the Senate, and the
majority of Americans who elected them.”

Tasini, who previously ran an unsuccessful primary against Hillary Clinton in 2006, is a longshot candidate in NY-Sen, where the Gillibrand-Ford matchup is heating up. However, as an organizing tool, and a way to potentially get other candidates across the nation involved with the movement to end the filibuster, this strikes me as a useful exercise. Included in his website is a petition to end the filibuster which could gather widespread support from progressives. And it could aid in attracting other candidates to the cause. As Tasini says, “I believe a large number of voters would actively participate in this campaign, if it was led by people they respect.”

FDL News will be fanning out to question other Senate candidates on the Democratic side on their views about the filibuster, armed with this information.

The progressive activist community is already on top of this. Carl Pope, the Executive Director of the Sierra Club, told FDL News that Senators get far too much leverage from the 60-vote threshold for the filibuster. “The Senate is really run like the 18th century Polish Sejm, in which because all members were considered nobility, the idea of submitting to majoritarian decision making was inconsistent with their dignity — and they held on to that prerogative until 1793, finally realizing that the ‘liberum veto’ had crippled and weakened the Polish state and left it dangerously exposed to its neighbors, Russia and Prussia — who shortly thereafter, before Poland could recover as a nation, occupied and partioned it, and Poland vanished from the map of Europe for 125 years.” This, he says, is why reform of the Senate is so desperately needed so the nation can once again meet important challenges.