One of the associate editors has a post on the front page today in which he talks about Reid [doing something at] "the beginning of the next session of Congress when the Senate adopts its new rules".
I understand that many Kossacks would like to believe that is what happens, but, as a few minutes' investigation would have shown, it isn't. As the Senate's own official site says, right here:
The rules of the Senate shall continue from one Congress to the next Congress unless they are changed as provided in these rules.
That is, the rules change only when explicitly modified.
This reflects a broad misunderstanding, and, frankly, it irks me. I understand that it would be nice if the Senate rules were designed to make it easy to pass good legislation and hard to pass bad legislation. They aren't; they are deliberately designed to make it hard to pas legislation at all, good or bad. The members of the Senate, over the centuries, have observed that good legislation eventually tends to get passed, no matter what obstacles arise, and that the problem facing the rules-makers is preventing bad and arbitrary legislation from making it through.
Think about the USA PATRIOT act, or the FISA update, or the Iraq war authorization. Wouldn't it have been better if those had not passed? If 9/11 hadn't happened, do you think that any of them would have made it into law? I certainly don't. The rules are designed to allow brave Senators to stop such runaway trains. The exceptions are designed to prevent obdurate abuse. Cloture is an exception; the belief of the rule-makers is that Senators will not tend to oppose good bills mindlessly, knowing, as they do, that they will eventually have to face the voters.
Thus, the Senate has made it very easy to stop a bill, very hard to keep a bill going -- and next to impossible to change those rules. That's the way the rules are; if you want them changed, you'll need to get 67 votes -- as I explain here -- to change that.