That Cooling Saucer

Will Wilkinson defends the Senate's snail-pace:

The ideologue insists that her intensely favored conception of justice demands or forbids certain policies no matter the complexion of public opinion or democratic procedural ideals. She insists that certain odious preferences and ridiculous beliefs must not to be taken into account at all, or only at a steep discount. Having no sincere interest in the deliberative and balancing aspects of democracy, then, the ideologue tends to confuse democracy with majoritarian head-counting.

Douthat defends the filibuster from a different angle:

[U]nless Americans suddenly turn extraordinarily self-sacrificial, you’re never going to persuade vulnerable legislators to join a party-line vote to, say, implement a VAT (if they’re Democrats) or means-test Social Security (if they’re Republicans). We’ll get fiscal responsibility through a bipartisan compromise, engineered by centrists in both parties and capable of getting 65-70 votes, or else we won’t get it at all. We may need a better class of centrist to make such a compromise possible — but we probably don’t need to abolish the filibuster along the way.