"Don't fear the reaper. Beat him."

The simple reality is that to get anything done, Democrats will need to reform the Senate to end the ability of the party out of power to force everything—from routine business to major legislation—to secure 60 votes in order to clear a once-obscure procedural hurdle.

This is the tool McConnell wielded against Obama as a weapon of mass obstruction. He calculated that Republicans could obstruct relentlessly, play on the media’s “both sides” instincts to defray blame, and then be rewarded when the public blamed the party in power for gridlock. To that end, McConnell obliterated all records for deploying the 60-vote threshold, using it as many times in Obama’s first term as in the previous 20 years combined.