On the front of Politico is an article about how the big bipartisan deals that used to be relatively common in Congress now appear to be a thing of the past. Good bye and good riddance. At their core these bipartisan deals were and are about destroying basic democratic accountability.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) told a crowd in Northbrook that he would like to see the Senate rules changed so that if a minority wanted to filibuster to prevent a vote on the bill, they would need to actually continuously talk on the Senate floor. Why not just majority rules?

The proud shameful tradition of the filibuster in our august broken Senate being used by a small group of privileged elites to deny rights to segments of this country now continues unbroken for over a century. Today, the legislative action that should have begun the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” failed to get cloture by a vote of 56 to 43 (note: for procedural reason Harry Reid had to switch his vote for yes to no). Those 43 senators used the filibuster to deny homosexuals their right to serve openly in our armed forces without government-imposed legal discrimination based on a minority status. In a sane democracy, winning 56 percent of the vote would be a victory, but sanity is at best an unwelcomed guest in the modern United States Senate.

The Senate Republicans have made it clear since the beginning of 2009 they had no desire to reach bipartisan compromise with the Democrats. Instead they choose the surprisingly successful strategy pure obstructionism using a set of broken and arcane Senate rules. By effectively preventing the Democrats from governing (or preventing the Dems from governing effectively, take your pick), the Republicans have been able to tarnish their opponents in the eye’s of many voters, and therefore improve the GOP’s own election prospects.

We learned Wednesday from The Hill that many Democratic Senators don’t actually support all the great things they claim they have “fought for.” They lied to voters; they refuse to take the small step that would actually allow them to become law.

One Senator — freshman Tom Udall of New Mexico — is trying to change Senate Republican’s obstructionism by putting the focus back on governing rather than the crippling rules which have led, in a pretty direct way, to American decline.