Over at the Plum Line, Greg Sargent raises a good question regarding the coverage and criticism of Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), who's quitting the Senate.
Has anyone else noticed this? In the wake of Senator Evan Bayh's announcement that he plans to retire, pundits and media outlets have lavished endless attention on his claim that "brain dead partisanship" has made life in the Senate no longer worth living.
Yet Bayh also has called for the filibuster to be reformed, as a way of preventing that "brain dead" partisanship from paralyzing our political system. But that pronouncement from Bayh is getting virtually no pundit or media attention at all.
Which is fair enough. Let's acknowledge that Evan Bayh went on MSNBC and said this:
On MSNBC, Bayh said "we need to look at the filibuster and reform" it in order to stop partisan deadlock in the Senate.
He also referenced the Civil Rights-era Senate tenure of his father, Sen. Birch Bayh, when "the filibuster was being used to frustrate some basic fundamental equities in this country." In response, the vote total needed to break a filibuster was lowered from 67 votes to 60.
"Perhaps the threshold should be lowered once again," he said, adding that 55 might be the right number.
And, in truth, Bayh made a very sound case for changing the filibuster. You can watch him make said case, below:
[WATCH]
This matters. The media is holding Bayh out as some saintly centrist, but news outlets are only reporting the parts of the senator's comments that fit into their preferred narrative -- "both parties" have created a bitter, toxic political environment -- instead of what the senator actually wants to do to help fix the problem.
Bayh's support for reforming the process Republicans broke can make a real difference -- his endorsement makes changing the filibuster rules seem like a necessary, mainstream idea. And it is. But this will only gain traction, and the Senate will only be able to function again, if the public hears about it.
Of course, one of the people who did do what he could to make sure the public hears about it was Matt Yglesias. And in one sentence, he pointed out why you should maybe curb your enthusiasm:
It's too bad he's not running for re-election to fight for these reforms.
That's sort of the rock in the road, here. As I've documented, over the past year, Evan Bayh has had great success in shaping major policy debates so that they ascribe to his point of view. With that success rate, there'd be no reason to believe that he couldn't successfully reform the filibuster as well. But he's quitting the Senate, so there you go.
Maybe Evan Bayh will make good on his boast to start some company and hire a single American and then that company can reform the filibuster, from Indianapolis, or something. But odds are, important reforms of the United States Senate will be achieved by actual members of the United States Senate.
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