He was deputy chief of staff to then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The most searing denunciations, they come from the insiders. This is not a situation where it’s only outside critics who recognize something is wrong. They may disagree on how to fix it and what is wrong, but they are appalled. For all the people that work their whole lives to get there, they get there and they look around, and they’re appalled. And one of the fascinating things about talking to Republican and Democratic senators and Republican and Democratic staffers is nobody likes the place anymore. I reported on the Senate for a long time. It is not the Senate the founders wanted or built. Something completely different has happened. This is not the Senate of the 20th century. Since 2010, it has taken on average more than 80 votes each year to end filibusters - more than 80. Those filibusters were often aimed at civil rights bills - but fewer than one vote to break them each year. And I’m not saying that’s a record of glory. From 1917 to 1970, the Senate took 49 votes to break filibusters - 49. And so I want to begin with this statistic.

As you’re going to hear in this episode, it used to be technically stronger. Because we’ve had a filibuster for a long time.

And this is one of those places where you really need to convince people something has changed. Obviously, the key reason nothing passes the Senate is the mutation of the filibuster into a 60-vote supermajority threshold for basically everything - not literally everything, but basically everything. So many of our policy debates, we have and we fight them out and we care about them, and nobody ever seems to realize that they’re moot because nothing passes the Senate. Because no matter what it is you care about - a minimum wage, a Green New Deal, gun control, democracy reform - whether or not bills can pass the Senate is the debate upstream of that question. A project of this show is to try to get you and everyone else to care about Senate rules. So whether you’re a new listener of the show or an old listener of the show, something you’re probably catching on to is that a lot of the way I think about legislative politics is about the Senate. I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.” Transcript The Senate Is Making a Mockery of Itself A former Senate staffer explains how the institution became a legislative black hole - and how to fix it.

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