I sometimes feel surreal that US Congress people get paid to professionally kill time.

While true it's not too often that filibusterers actually happen. The threat of doing it is usually enough to kill a vote.

And Senate Majority Leader Joe Manchin has stated that he is unequivocally against removing the filibuster.

Chuck Schumer is the Senate Majority Leader.

Joe Manchin can thwart or shape any legislation that has only Democrat support, which is a large amount of de facto power to wield, hence the joke.

That’s the joke

That might be a notion too drenched in game theory.

The filibuster itself is not some sort of switch that gets flipped. The parties need to be careful how often they use it and for which reasons. It's just a part of the procedural possibilities and its effectiveness is not some sort of set-in-stone rule.

In our particular case right now, the reason the Senate does not allow us single-party rule is due to the makeup of the senators themselves. It only takes a few to not vote down the party line to negate single-party rule. We've seen this a few times already since the start of the new administration.

This is incredibly naive of the current way the filibuster is employed. There is no care in how it's used because the line in the sand has gone from "did you vote on bill" to "did you block bill from being voted on" for attack ads. How can you say we're "careful" when it's tripled in usage.

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/democracy/reports/20...

The current reason we care about a few senators is because we are looking at budget reconciliation where you only need 50 votes. Outside of that you need 60 votes or you get filibustered.

Your own article proves my very point:

> Note that, in some cases, filibustered bills were eventually passed but with substantial concessions to the senators blocking the original bill.

We have clearly seen over the past many decades an evolution in the kinds of bills we pass, and I think it's quite easy to observe that controversial bills are front-loaded specifically to combat this. The negotiations have changed to meet the needs of the new battlefield.

Perhaps this is "naive," of me but the kinds of bills the Senate has passed recently have me surprised its use has only gone up 3x.

I can find no way to read this comment generously.

Your original point was that use of the fillibuster was judicious. The article goes on, at length, about exactly how the use of the fillibuster has only substantially increased over time.

And then here you plucked out a single sentence from the article used as a good-faith caveat before presenting data to say the article "proved your point."

The majority party can remove the filibuster rule anytime it likes, as they have done for several special cases in recent years.

The current majority party has just enough DINOs to prevent that from happening.