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12 January 2022

Articles of Confederation 2.0

[T]he more urgent question for the Senate remains why bare majorities in radically gerrymandered state legislatures should have the power to defeat free and fair elections for Congress, while Congress has no power to defend itself against those distortions unless a supermajority in the Senate agrees.
The modern filibuster has restored the supermajority rules of our first and failed constitution, the Articles of Confederation. Like those articles, it is defended by people who believe that supermajority requirements induce compromise. But the failure of the first American republic led our Framers to reject that mistaken theory. And it is high time for the Senate to answer one obvious question: 
Why do a group of senators representing a relatively minuscule number of Americans, through Senate rules, get to undo the one clearly good idea of our Framers—that legislatures be governed by legislative majorities?
From here.

Congress has a lot on its plate. 

It needs to end the filibuster. It needs to fix the flawed Electoral College Act of 1887 and thwart conservative legal day dreams that would allow state legislators to ignore the decisions of voters in their state when it comes time to cast electoral votes. It needs to pass election law reform to clamp down on anti-Democratic Republican legislation at the state level to suppress voter turnout in Democratic party leaning constituencies and allow out of control gerrymandering. It needs to expand the Supreme Court to wrest control from a manipulated 6-3 hyper-conservative majority. It needs to give the District of Columbia statehood, and give Puerto Rico a better shot at statehood as well. 

Breaking the filibuster is the most important. But Congress may very well lack the will to fix it. Democrats, due to a couple of democrats in name only (DINOs) don't seem to have the votes to make that happen.

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