Institutional grand strategy  

Matt Yglesias has an interesting column up suggesting that the Democrats take this opportunity to scrap the filibuster. He (along with Nathan Newman) takes a broader view of progressive politics through recent decades, arguing that the filibuster has worked against liberal change in more cases than it's worked in favor of it. This does seem to be the case, and Yglesias argues that it has to do with the very nature of progressive politics:

The liberal difficulty is what it always has been -- getting new stuff passed into law. The public's instinctive skepticism toward novelty is re-enforced by the fact that the American political system puts into place an uncommonly large number of veto points at which legislation may be blocked. New bills must pass two separate legislative houses, each representing different sorts of constituencies; acquire a presidential signature; and pass muster with the Supreme Court. The filibuster merely enhances this tendency, already an outlier in the democratic world.

It seems to me he's overdramatizing the difficulties of getting legislation passed. This is not a closed system: when, given a strong majority of Americans supporting a piece of legislation, does it fail to pass (without major political consequences)? And should we really pass major reforms without supermajority support? Successful institutions usually slow things down, and for good reason -- it wouldn't do to have a legislative revolution every time a new majority comes to power. I'm not sure Social Security would would have survived the past few months without the threat of Democratic filibuster. The rights of the minority should be protected -- this notion that the filibuster is somehow undemocratic seems to be everywhere, and it betrays a pretty narrow view of democracy as exclusively about executing the will of the majority. Actually, democracy in its American incarnation has been about balancing the will of the majority with the protection of the minority -- is the Bill of Rights antidemocratic because it limits the power of the majority? The filibuster's supermajority requirement is a similar protection, except that the "rights" are not defined, and usually the minority is much larger.

If I were going to make an argument in favor of the filibuster, I think I would focus on the changing role of the courts for progressives. Recent decades have seen a lot of leftward changes despite conservatives' use of the filibuster because the court system has consistently expanded individual liberties through broader and broader readings of the Constitution. On these issues, progress has been much faster because the courts have actually been a more streamlined mechanism for political change than Congress (a truly incredible assertion, if you think about it). We might consider this state of affairs to be a sort of institutional imbalance -- a necessary response to the planned barriers Yglesias talks about in that quote above. So, the courts wouldn't have to intervene if Congress were capable of doing the right thing in the first place, but it because of the filibuster. Of course, the problem with changing all this is right now that the courts themselves are at issue; eliminating the filibuster would result in a stacked, and likely long lived, conservative judiciary.

MORE: I guess that last paragraph still seems a bit muddled. My point is just that if we're going to look at institutional design issues in the Congress and how those issues have affected progressive legislation, we should also be looking at where the courts fit into that picture, and how the balance might change in the event the filibuster is eliminated.