We Sometimes Forget Why Democracy Is Great!

San Francisco -- Watching anxious moments unfold in Cairo, while the Tea Party in the U.S. gets ready to stage its own private auto-da-fé/purge trial of insufficiently conservative senators like Orrin Hatch, I remembered one of our system's great strengths. Our politicians have repressive instincts, just like Tunisia's autocratic former president, Ben Ali. Our leaders get panicked into believing that they are on the back of a tiger and can't get off, just like Hosni Mubarak. Reform movements eat their young, as happened in Iran. And when a frustrated people suddenly feel empowered, they can go off the deep end, as some in Egypt seem likely to do.

But the consequences of those failings in our democratic system are not immediately lethal, and the potential for correcting them is hard-wired.

If the Utah Tea Party decides that Senator Hatch (American Conservative Union Lifetime and 2009 Rating 88 percent) is a closet leftist and defeats him in the Republican primary because he departed from orthodoxy and worked with Ted Kennedy, or if their colleagues in Indiana purge Senator Richard Lugar (92 percent ACU lifetime score), then what happens? The odds are that Utah would elect an even more conservative, and perhaps actually wacky, senator (something it has done before) and that Indianans would turn Lugar's seat over to a Democrat (again, something that's happened before.) And over time, it is likely that mainstream, ordinarily conservative Republicans in both of those states will get fed up and take their party back -- or that those two states will even trend Democratic.

In Egypt, things are much scarier. I spent two days there last month, leaving on the day Tunisia exploded. Cairo was a city literally, emotionally, and symbolically choking to death. The dust and pollution were horrendous. It took 2 1/2 hours to drive from Giza to Tahrir square on a Thursday evening -- about 6 kilometers. The day after we left, before street demonstrations began, emails to our friends in civil-society organizations suddenly couldn't be delivered -- the regime had preemptively cut off communications to anyone it saw as a potential leader outside of its control, however peaceful or seemingly irrelevant.

Fix the Senate? Not Yet

Washington, D.C. -- Senate reformers, led by Tom Harkin, Tom Udall, and Jeff Merkley, fought an indecisive first round on fixing the Senate rules this week. The official outcome -- some very modest tweaks, plus a commitment by the leadership of both parties not to change Senate rules by a simple majority for the next four years -- look like a defeat. But there has been a marked change in the chemistry of the Senate. The idea of a single senator being able to hold off action with a secret hold, and the idea that everything ought to take 60 votes to pass -- are being challenged by a significant, if as yet inadequate, block of senators.

The crucial vote was on the proposal by Senator Merkley to require senators who want to kill a bill with debate bill to actually filibuster -- if they claim they want more debate, make them debate. This would not end the practice of a minority being able to block legislation -- but a minority could not longer prevent discussion. It failed, 49-46.

(Under the arcane Senate rules, on Thursday it would have taken 67 votes to be adopted. But later in the year it might take only 60. And in theory 51 could do it, although Reid and McConnell both agreed to rule out following the Constitution by allowing a simple Senate majority to set its own rules.)

Not a single Republican voted to require actual debate -- and Democratic Senators Baucus and Levin joined the Republicans. (Democrats Feinstein, Kerry, and Inouye were not present.) An earlier vote on Senator Tom Udall's effort to require actual debate, as well as other reforms, fell even further short, with Democratic Senators Kohl, Reed, Webb, and Pryor joining the Republicans along with Baucus and Levin.

Escaping the Black Hole in the Heart of DC

Washington, DC — The black hole, of course, is the Senate Rules. Efforts to make major reforms in the Senate this week — reforms that would allow the Senate to vote on public business — fell afoul of... the Senate Rules. Lacking a clear majority for significant changes, Senators Tom Udall and Jeff Merkley discovered that under the Senate Rules as they stand, there is virtually no way to get the issue of reforming the Rules onto the Senate floor, should there be resistance. So not only can't the Senate vote, it can't even debate whether it should be allowed to vote! And a few recalcitrant Democrats prevented them from assembling the 51 votes they needed to force real reform.

This resistance to dialogue is like the "singularity" that physicists tell us exists in a black hole: so powerful is the force exerted that even light cannot escape, once it is trapped.

The Senate will agree to more modest reforms — not enough. But the good news is that Merkley and Udall have found a way to continue to bring this issue up before the Senate over the next two years, so that every time the Minority abuses the Rules, they can be forced to publicly reject Rules reform. Which means that filibustering the public's business is no longer a free ride for Mitch McConnell and the Republican caucus, who can be held accountable and forced to vote, if not to actually debate.

This is ironic, since what McConnell claims he wants is to preserve the Senate's right to debate the issues. Actually he's shutting down debate, for fear that debate might lead to actual voting by Senators. But ordinary logic doesn't apply inside a black hole.

The first chance to see how well reformers in the Senate can shine a spotlight on the abuses comes Thursday, but as Udall said on Wednesday, quoting his uncle, former Congressman Morris Udall, "Reform is not for the short-of-breath. It takes time."

Now that we have begun the battle to Fix the Senate, we need to make sure that those Democrats who undercut the reformers — like North Dakota's Kent Conrad, Arkansas's Mark Pryor, and above all, Max Baucus of Montanta — hear from their constituents. And we need to put the Republicans on notice: if they abuse the Rules, the Rules can still be changed.