Cross-posted at tomudall.senate.gov.
In January, I wrote a diary here about the obstruction and inefficiency that the nation has witnessed in the U.S. Senate throughout my first year in the "world’s greatest deliberative body."
Since then things haven’t improved. In many ways, they’ve actually gotten worse. Over the past two months, we’ve seen the list of bills passed by the House of Representatives, but stalled in the Senate, climb to 290; we’ve seen a single senator hold up key legislation, causing the Highway Trust Fund and critical Unemployment Insurance to lapse; we've seen a single senator grind business to a halt to consider a project in his state; and we’ve seen routine nominations blocked by filibusters, or left to languish by the mere threat of filibuster, despite majority support of many.
The continued abuse of Senate rules is the kind of business-as-usual Washington politics that so frustrates the American people.
Our rules are broken and we need to fix them, and I have offered a simple proposal — the Constitutional Option.
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