On Monday at the America’s Future Now conference, Sen. Dick Durbin went out of his way to mention the proposed changes to the Senate rules spearheaded by Sen. Tom Udall, hedging in the direction of what he called “protecting minority rights.”

Durbin said that without the filibuster, President George W. Bush would likely have succeeded in privatizing Social Security.

“We have to find a reasonable way to continue the protection of minority rights in the United States government but beyond the abuses that are seen today,” he said.

I wrote at the time that Durbin was incorrectly raising the spectre of Social Security privatization, when that bill lost not as the result of the filibuster, but because it was deeply unpopular and the Republicans never took it up in the Senate.

Tom Udall backed up my memory when he appeared at the America’s Future Now conference today. Udall said that “as I remember it, we had a vote, a very close vote in the House, and it didn’t succeed. It never made it to the Senate.”

Durbin’s larger point was that Democrats must preserve the minority veto over legislation in case they find themselves in the minority at a future point. Udall said that Durbin generally supports his effort to get the Senate to change their rules, and that the argument is really over what to do with those rules rather than whether to move forward. “I think we can find a happy medium,” Udall said, where minority rights are respected but where the majority can actually function, in contrast to the sclerotic fashion in which they operate currently. Udall has been more insistent on getting the Senate to write their own rules than to set particular limits on what those rules would look like. Obviously, he wants to reduce the impact of the filibuster, but there are a number of ways to get to that point.

Udall singled out the over 100 nominees from the White House that have yet to be confirmed in the Senate, saying that it stands to reason that a President should be able to pick his own staff in a reasonable amount of time. He cited the frustrations of the over 20 Senators on the Democratic side brought in during the wave elections of 2006 and 2008, and how their message of change hit the reality of the Senate rules.

Udall still plans to offer a point of order which would change the Senate rules in the first day of the next Congress, in January of 2011. He described it as central to every challenge the country faces.