Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico has put an honest description of the antidemocratic filibuster rule on his website.
According to Jon Walker at FireDogLake Udall plans to call a point of order at the start of the next Congress to eliminate the filibuster rule.
This is the real solution that we need (although not all experts agree it has to wait for the start of a session), not asking the Vice President pretty please to declare the rule unconstitutional as Thomas Geoghegan suggests or supporting a filibusterable bill or pushing for a vote of — even worse — 67 senators (see the FireDogLake link above).
The filibuster rule just isn’t very popular among those who know what it is. Recently Pew found that 26% of Americans knew how many votes were needed to get around a filibuster. Zogby reports that 32% want to get rid of that anti-democratic blockage.
And these two polls were probably looking at samples of the same population, given Zogby’s findings confirming vast ignorance: Only 34% knew Republicans use the filibuster more. Only 28% knew the House represented public opinion better than the Senate.
Two weeks after those polls came out, a CBS/New York Times poll found that 50% want the filibuster rule thrown out. At that rate of increase, we should be at 100% by April. But it all depends how the pollster asks the question. This one asked if people would prefer simple majority rule to minority rule by 41 senators. The Zogby poll asked people whether the filibuster rule was undemocratic rather than pointing that fact out to them.
Chris Bowers at Open Left has a whip list of Senators willing to throw out the filibuster rule. Get whipping!