Ezra. Ever more pessimistic.

I couldn't find a place to snip and cut "Did the Senate just lose the future?" without losing its meaning (a testament to the writer). the last sentence was the killer for me:

The pity of the deal that Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell struck on rules reform is that this was a really good moment for Senate reform. The usual danger with this kind of project is that it'll end up being a power grab directed at passing some discrete pieces of legislation, as when Bill Frist tried to free judicial nominees from the filibuster, rather than an overhaul dedicated to making the institution work better. But with one party controlling the House and another controlling the Senate, there was no way that a more majoritarian Senate could start ramming all sorts of legislation into law. For the next two years -- and probably some time after that -- Barack Obama will not sign anything that John Boehner hasn't already approved. Both Republicans and Democrats had the luxury of contemplating the Senate's workings without giving either party a major advantage in passing new legislation.

Instead, the Senate decided that its current procedures are good enough. There's something slightly terrifying about that. Accepting a dysfunctional legislature is, as James Fallows and others have argued, one way to lose the future. Our problems -- debt, health-care costs, infrastructure, education, etc. -- are on autopilot. Our solutions are not. Obama can give as many speeches as he wants. If we don't have a political system capable of acting on our challenges, we don't have a political system capable of overcoming them.

I've never been a huge fan of 'the constitutional option. My oft-expressed preference was for both parties to recognize that the Senate is broken and requires fairly fundamental reforms. One way to do that would be to phase in the reforms over six years, ensuring that no one knew who would benefit from the more majoritarian institution first. Another would've been to do it now, when divided government would undermine any advantage that Democrats might gain from the new rules, and thus might have given both parties space to participate in the process with more of a long-range perspective.

Instead, both parties decided to back off. There were hard decisions to be made, and they agreed not to make them. They chose the parochial comforts of what they were used to, and what would advantage each of them personally, to the discomfort and sacrifice that creating a more workable legislative process would require.

When I speak publicly, I always get variants of the same question: We've got so many problems to solve. Can we solve them? And the answer I always give is the same: Yes. in most cases, we already know what to do. The question is simply whether we'll do it. And I'm a lot less confident about that.

As much as I personally at "the Club" (aka the Senate) I understand the Founder's intentions. The House is and remains the House of the people, where their passions are recognized, and Legislation passed in accordance with those passions.

Problem is the people are flakes. They tent to jerk the Country too hard one way or the other, and the consequences of such flakiness can be rather dramatic.  WE WANT HEALTH CARE!!!  JUST NOT FOR THOSE PEOPLE!!  WE WANT GOVERNMENT SERVICES!!  JUST DON'T TAX US FOR IT!!!  And of course KEEP YOUR GOVERNMENT HANDS OFF MY MEDICARE!!!

 Thus, we have the Senate, the saucer that cools (or kills) the drink. It's function is to prevent the leftward-rightward shifts the people want to put the country through are milder, less severe.