If Democrats actually feel they have something akin to a hostage crisis, they shouldn’t be paying ransom–this only encourages more hostage-taking in the future, with demands for even bigger ransoms. The proper response to a hostage crisis is to disarm the hostage takers. This is, in effect, what Sen. Tom Harkin’s (D-IA) push to end the current filibuster would do at the beginning of next year.

Next year, at the beginning of the next Congress, the Senate has the opportunity to change its rules by a majority vote. Tom Udall has been pushing this all year; he calls it “the Constitutional option.” Udall would ask for a ruling from the chair, probably Joe Biden, to make a ruling on the ability of the Senate to change the rules. If Republicans object, Democrats will move to table their objection, and they only need 51 votes to uphold it. After that, the Senate can rewrite the rules.

Some old-line Democrats have been wary of this approach, but you get the sense that they are completely fed up with how the Senate operates. So they have set a date – January 5 – to attempt to change the rules.

The Brennan Center for Justice is out today with a report on the abuse of the filibuster in the 111th Congress. It lays out pretty firmly that the Senate is simply not the body envisioned by the Founders when they created it.

What’s important to understand is that this reversion to 2009 rates permanently would cost the country $292 billion dollars, according to the Tax Policy Center. If we made it retroactive to capture the tax on estates in this holiday year of 2010, maybe it’s closer to $250 billion. But it’s still a large hole in the budget relative to current law, in a time when every deficit hawk is screaming about long-term debt.

Fellow Netroots Nation panelist Elizabeth Warren has continued to receive endorsements from key Senators and editorialists to get the position of director for the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

I had a chance to talk briefly with Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) last night, and we discussed a variety of issues. Udall’s here at Netroots Nation today for a panel on his effort to change the Senate rules at the beginning of the next Congress, an initiative for which he is getting “a lot of support,” not just from members of the Senate Democratic caucus but from incoming candidates. Talk of changing the Senate rules is hanging over this conference, most recently from Speaker Pelosi, who basically could have summed up her hourlong remarks in the morning session by saying “the Senate sucks.”

Sen Tom Udall backed up my memory when he appeared at the America’s Future Now conference Wednesday, regarding the attempt to privatize Social Security under the Bush administration. Udall said that “as I remember it, we had a vote, a very close vote in the House, and it didn’t succeed. It never made it to the Senate.”

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.

The NRSC put together a commercial that’s supposed to scare the bejesus out of everyone at the thought of EFCA (the Employee Free Choice Act) passing under an Obama administration, but I couldn’t have made a better one myself.