What’s the point of the Senate?

What’s the point of the Senate?

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President Obama won widespread praise from the left for his inaugural address on Monday, offering a vigorous defense of the safety net, social equality, and liberal values in general. But Thursday produced a reminder of just how difficult it will be for the president to match his rhetoric with substantive second-term achievements.

Presented with demands from progressive activists – and more than a few members of the chamber – that they use a simple majority vote to overhaul the Senate’s filibuster rules, Democratic leaders balked and settled instead for a compromise that will produce, at best, cosmetic changes to the way the Senate does business. It was enough to prompt Iowa’s Tom Harkin, a veteran senator and outspoken advocate for major filibuster reform, to say that Obama “might as well take a four-year vacation.”

Harkin surely spoke those words in haste, but his frustration is understandable. Republicans have used the filibuster to turn the Senate into a de facto 60-vote body. It was the key tool they deployed in 2009 and 2010 to stall and water down Obama’s agenda, back when Democrats enjoyed robust majorities in both legislative chambers but (except for a few months) fell short of the magic 60-vote mark in the Senate. With Republicans grabbing control of the House in 2010 and retaining it last fall, the filibuster itself is no longer as essential to Republican obstruction efforts, but they continue to use it at record levels

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did the democrats win or not?  .