This fucking sucks and I hate the Senate who acts like the House of the Lords....

it is time for the French revoltion of .."Off with their heads"

There's a rather large flaw in this argument. The flaw is that they just assume all 60 Democratic votes. It's not so easy. Dawn Johnson, to take your example, probably would have a hard time getting 60 Democratic votes, and if she did there would have to be a lot of horse-trading to get them. These problematic Democratic votes just happen to be many of the same votes they're having a hard time corralling for health care reform.

On the other hand, there was the report of a comment by an anonymous Justice Department employee back in May that he was up to his eyeballs in frustration with O's micromanaging his department.

Smells like Jimmy Carter. Talks like Bobby Kennedy. However, he's making Lyndon Johnson look like a saint. WHY are Dems so damned afraid of the Pentagon?

So, after reading all the responses so far, I see two trends:

First is the trend of an animal caught in a trap that chews off its own leg to get free. We are animals with opposible thumbs and brains; there is no need to chew off our own feet.

Second, there's an apparent failure to not see the big picture when looking at the graph kindly provided by Brian.

Instead of laying blame at the feet of Democrats for being weak or whatever, maybe it's worth noting that what the graph reveals: This historically under-used method of obstruction began peaking off-the-charts with the rise of the Neoconservative movement. The timeline is an exact match.

You know, the Reagan Revolution, which actually saw its earliest stirrings a decade before but really didn't become cemented as a movement, a silent/bloodless civil war until Nixon?

All the key players found their way to power over that gestation period of the late 60s through the 70s and "flowered" under Reagan with his corporatocracy Voodoo Economics/trickle-down crap: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Podhoretz, Pearle, Wolfowitz, Ailes, Kristol (father and son) and many more who, except the late senior Kristol, are all still think-tanking, plotting and scheming, and ever devising ways to block their opposition (the chart...) while scrabbling to retain power for the corporate overlords.

Yes. I believe there is a lack of cohesiveness on the part of Democrats that is continually exploited by these neocon thugs. Yes. Perhaps Senate rules need to be altered to prevent such obstructionism from barring forward movement.

But blaming those who get trampled under the feet of these anti-democratic (small "d") forces is tantamount to blaming the victim of abuse and de facto taking the side of the abuser. It's taking our eyes off the true enemy here, the enemy that really, really wants this government to be a one-party-rule form of governance, and that single party bows in obeisance to corporate masters.

Instead of beating up on the victims of abuse, it's time to figure out how to open the trap, instead of chewing off our own leg to get out.

Maybe one method is to continue applying pressure against the DINOs, those who are just-maybe a bit too close to the neocon revolutionaries in their corporate obeisance. You know, We the People exerting our pressure and all that. This is the true test of a true democratic republic.

If The People actually rule, we have to exert pressure and exert pressure, relentlessly, until the anti-democratic enemy is defeated.

Those enemies, nationally, are weakened at the moment, though the most virulently anti-government representatives of this enemy, in this revolution, are in the Senate — and a few of them are on the Blue side of the aisle.

Pressure, pressure, pressure. We can not give up or lose...(sorry)... hope... or determination. Because, if we do, they win and this country will continue the death spiral these real enemies started over 30 years ago.