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" I never had much faith that the Senate was going to go the full monty on reforming itself. (And I wasn&amp;#039;t entirely sure I wanted it to do so since, had Republican primary voters in Nevada, Delaware, Indiana, and Missouri not lost what passes for their minds in the last two election cycles, I suspect I would not enjoy what came out of an untrammelled Republican senatorial majority very much.) There&amp;#039;s something basic to all political transactions that it&amp;#039;s a very hard pull to get people to vote their own powers out of existence. (We only have the system we have now because Bob LaFollette and his friends delayed the entry of the United States into a world war.) So, when all the agitating about the filibuster began, I wasn&amp;#039;t at all convinced that any major changes in that maddening practice would be forthcoming. The deal Harry Reid cut today with Mitch McConnell is going to make people crazy, but I never read anything that indicated that Reid had enough votes for the kind of sweeping changes for which the more progressive members of his caucus were pushing. (There are as many people in Reid&amp;#039;s caucus \u2014 including, I suspect, Reid himself \u2014 whose primary loyalty is to the institution as there are on the other side. To name just a couple, neither Charles Schumer nor Dianne Feinstein are exactly boat rockers.) Personally, I wanted the talking filibuster, not just for the pure theater of it, but because it is a mechanism for transparency and honesty. Absent that, I&amp;#039;m no more satisfied than I am surprised. I think Reid got the best deal he could, and I think he got it within the parameters of what he thought was acceptable, and he did get actual changes in the rules, and not some good-old-boy transaction that the Republicans can ignore the first chance they get. That&amp;#039;s progress, anyway. You want more? Elect different senators. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a17250/harry-reid-gets-what-he-wants/?src=rss>