Can We Just Fast-Forward to the Part Where the Democrats Kill the Filibuster?

It’s the only way a Congress — and, for that matter, a president — will be able to get anything done

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) talks to reporters with Sen. John Thune (R-SD) (L) and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) following the weekly Senate Republican caucus luncheon in the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill March 16, 2021, in Washington, D.C. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

There may be a way to make meaningful progress in this declining empire, but one thing stands in our way: the filibuster. Finally, Democrats are talking about doing away with it in order to advance legislation — and Mitch McConnell, known to legislate (and occasionally pose in pictures) like a Jim Crow throwback, is caught up in his feelings over the prospect.

“Let me say this very clearly for all 99 of my colleagues,” McConnell declared on the Senate floor earlier this month.“Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin — can even begin to imagine — what a completely scorched-earth Senate would look like.” In the words of McConnell, evil personified, the outcome would make the partisan gridlock of recent years look like “child’s play.”

Just last week, McConnell remarked that the filibuster, an arcane Senate rule made up to benefit segregationists, “has no racial history at all. None. There’s no dispute among historians about that.” Historians disagree. So did…