President Joe Biden just cranked up the increase in pressure on Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to get on board the effort to at least partially reform the Senate filibuster. Which is entirely fitting, since if the filibuster rule remains unchanged, the only things Biden will be able to accomplish will be through the budgetary process -- which does cover a lot, but leaves out some rather big initiatives (like voting rights and increasing the minimum wage, to name just two). Everything else will die on the Senate floor, because there just aren't 10 Republican senators willing to work with Biden on anything.

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To begin with, let's review a basic fact: the Senate filibuster was not created by the drafters of the United States Constitution. The filibuster is not actually mentioned (either by name or in any other way) in the Constitution itself. The Constitution merely states that each chamber of Congress "may determine the rules of its proceedings" -- that's it. The filibuster is merely one of those rules; one that has evolved over time. In my lifetime, the filibuster changed from requiring a two-thirds majority vote (67) to only three-fifths (60). Nothing is sacred about either one of those ratios (and I leave it for others to point out, on the grim centennial anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, the historical importance of the term "three-fifths" in the Constitution's original language). But the fact that it already has been recently changed shows that the filibuster rule is subject at any time to any changes that a majority of the Senate agrees upon. No constitutional amendment was necessary to make this change back in the 1970s, as it is merely a Senate rule. So a simple vote changed it.

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