Perhaps the biggest obstacle to demolishing the filibuster is the cynicism and defeatism of those who assume this can't be done. The obstacles are fearsome, but they cannot be worse than the obstacles faced by the generations of activists who called for, and eventually won, direct citizen election of US Senators via the 17th Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified April 1913. I mentioned this in comments to a recent diary on the filibuster by Chris, and there was some objection to the comparability of the fight for the 17th to the filibuster, so I wanted to elaborate on the magnitude of this victory to make clear that yes, bigger and more difficult Senate reforms have been done than ending the filibuster.
No mistake about it, the 17th Amendment was an epic battle, one that began as early as 1826 (when the first amendment attempt appears in Congress). After its passage, Wilson's Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan described it superlatively as the greatest reform attained in over a century. It's hard to agree with that, given the importance of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, but does make it clear that a major contemporary populist figure viewed this as a big victory.
Consider the situation prior to its passage: The amendment to require Senators to face election must get passed by two-thirds of the Senate, a chamber of men selected, not elected, by the legislatures of their home States (sometimes with only plurality support). After this, three-quarters of the State legislatures would then have to ratify a measure decreasing their power and influence over the more powerful chamber in the national government. All the built-in incentives were opposed to this.
Here's how the New York times described the issue, the day after the 17th Amendment passed Congress in 1912 (transcribed from PDF at link by me, errors mostly mine):
So imagine you're a state that has given its electoral college votes to Republican candidates in every election except for the very biggest Democratic landslides, and has done so for 11 straight elections. But you have this very cute provision, whereby some of your state's electoral college votes can be peeled off, if the other party manages to win in any of the state's federal congressional districts. Now of course, this has never happened since the rule was put in place, so it was just a bit of cute trivia for election geeks to blather about, but no one expected it to actually happen.
Then one election, it actually does. Now you're the State's dominant party, the Republican party. What do you do?
Why, end the system and go back to a winner-take-all, of course.
This weekend, Chris Bowers posted on North Carolina's flirtation with shaking up the electoral college. The gist of it is that they want to stop giving all their electoral votes to the statewide winner and start apportioning them by Congressional district. I was kind of ambivalent about this idea until I gave it some more thought. And by "gave it some more thought", I mean read Hendrick Hertzberg. Because it turns out California is going to have to consider it now too.
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