How Republicans could shut the Senate down, if they wanted to

Brad Plumer on WondBlog explains How Republicans could shut the Senate down, if they wanted to

"As we’ve been noting, Democrats in the Senate are proposing to tweak the chamber’s filibuster rules when the 113th Congress convenes in January. Doing so would make it somewhat more cumbersome for the GOP minority to block legislation. And Democrats argue that they can make these changes with a simple 51-vote majority — the so-called ‘constitutional option.’

In response, some Republicans are threatening to bring the entire chamber to a halt if Democrats go forward with this. ‘I think the backlash will be severe,’ Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) told Politico earlier this week. ’It will shut down the Senate,’ warned John Cornyn (R-Tex.)"

They could start demanding their 30 hours of post-cloture debate time which are usually waived or they could start objecting to the many procedural unanimous consent votes and really shut things down. The proposed reforms don't sound so big, but I do think that if you asked the average person, they think to filibuster you need to stand and talk like Jimmy Stewart. Returning the filibuster to that seems like a good thing, and seems like an argument the Democrats could make the people. Another problem with the current system, in addition to their being no cost to the minority, there's no news about it. The public doesn't even know when there's a filibuster going on, or that there's one every day. Now we have reporters writing that a bill failed because it didn't get 60 votes, like that's a normal thing.