Filibuster reform may be boring, but Rachel Maddow urges viewers to take
the issue more seriously because “a tiny minority cannot thwart the
will of the majority anymore.” After viewers’ attempts to possibly
“re-brand” the soporific filibuster, Nation DC Editor Chris Hayes
answers the question: “Could Democrats get rid of the filibuster
tomorrow, if they really wanted to?”

The answer, he says, is a qualified yes. Hayes proposes four ways to get
rid of the filibuster including: changing Senate rules, i.e. the cloture rule, (that requires 67 votes); statutorily, which requires passing a bill with 60 votes to change the rule (Senator Tom Harkin has proposed this), or even using the nuclear option, where they could eliminate the filibuster with 50 senators and vice presidential approval. “There have been moments in which procedural
changes have happened in the Senate,” he says. “It happened after World
War I. It happened after Watergate in the 1970s. And in every case, it
wasn’t a procedural change so much as a political change.”