Bernie Sanders filibustering* tax deal

And none of that faux-filibustering* crap that the GOP has pulled over a hundred times this Congress, either.  Sanders is actually holding the floor and speaking to prevent a vote.  He's been going for about five and a half hours at this point, and he seems to be on a roll.

If only people watched C-SPAN 2, America would be getting a great civics lesson.

But while Sanders' filibuster is pretty damn cool, it's not so cool as to make me reconsider my support for reforming/abolishing the filibuster.  Sanders is just providing an inspirational capstone to a Congress marked by an unconscionable level of filibustering by the GOP.  By the Senate's count, 132 cloture motions were filed during this Congress prior to today.  139 were filed in the 110th Congress.

In the 109th Congress--the most recent one when the GOP controlled the Senate, and Democrats were in the minority--there were 68 cloture motions filed.

Common Cause has a petition for filibuster reform in the 112th Congress, which convenes in January.  A bipartisan group of Senators and Senators-Elect are on board with changing the way cloture works.  Not that anyone reads this blog, but if you're a random Netizen who's stumbled across it by accident, go sign!

*- actually, this IS a faux-filibuster, in the sense that he's not actually blocking anything from being voted upon, but is merely holding the floor and speechifying.  But this is how we envision the filibuster working, and it's pretty good theatre.