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The past two years in the U.S. Senate has been one of filibuster after filibuster after filibuster by the Republicans:

As the 111th Congress hurtles to a close, more and more bills are dying despite receiving majority votes in the Senate, and in some cases, the House as well.

At least eight major pieces of legislation have been entirely halted by filibusters in this Congress -- six since September, including three in the past 10 days alone -- although each bill received more than 50 votes in the Senate. Five of those eight passed in some form with a majority vote in the House before failing to achieve a "super majority" vote in the Senate (60 out of 100 Senators). All fell just short of the 60 votes needed to invoke cloture and overcome a filibuster. The repeal of the ban on gays openly serving in the military, for example, "failed" 57-40 on December 9th, before being passed later.

It has long been a principle of American civics that a bill receiving simple majority votes in both the House and the Senate, and if signed by the president, becomes law. But now critics say the frequent use of the filibuster rule is undermining that constitutional principle by forcing bills to garner at least 60 votes.

Even Conservative scholars agree:

In May, congressional expert Norm Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute told the Senate Rules Committee that "the sharp increase in cloture motions reflects the 'routinization' of the filibuster -- its use not as a tool of last resort for a minority that feels intensely about a major issue, but as a weapon to delay and obstruct on nearly all matters, including routine and widely supported ones."

How bad has it gotten?

Since 2006, the number of cloture motions filed has exploded, from 68 just four years ago to at least 132 motions in the 111th Congress, according to Senate statistics.

Here's a complete list of cloture motions from the Senate.gov website.

It's the number of cloture motions that is key here. The minority very often simply "threatens" to filibuster, thereby forcing the majority to put together a super-majority of 60 votes to get past the filibuster by voting to invoke cloture, but the majority leader - Harry Reid, in the case of the 111th Congress from 2008-1010 - quite often doesn't force a complete vote to invoke cloture (ending the filibuster). He just says, "OK, they're going to filibuster, so instead of wasting time on the actual vote, we'll move on to other business."

It's the number of cloture motions filed that is the most important statistic, not the actual votes to get past the filibuster, which is why the graph below is so important.

Mitch McConnell - the Republican leader - had a very clear strategy of denying President Obama and the Democrats any legislative victories. They were clearly more interested in scoring political points instead of writing legislation, since any type of cooperation with the Democrats would enforce Obama's message that he's able to reach across the aisle to get things done:

Before the health care fight, before the economic stimulus package, before President Obama even took office, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, had a strategy for his party: use his extensive knowledge of Senate procedure to slow things down, take advantage of the difficulties Democrats would have in governing and deny Democrats any Republican support on big legislation.

Republicans embraced it. Democrats denounced it as rank obstructionism.

But in the short run at least, his approach has worked. For more than a year, he pleaded and cajoled to keep his caucus in line. He deployed poll data. He warned against the lure of the short-term attention to be gained by going bipartisan, and linked Republican gains in November to showing voters they could hold the line against big government.

On the major issues -- not just health care, but financial regulation and the economic stimulus package, among others -- Mr. McConnell has held Republican defections to somewhere between minimal and nonexistent, allowing him to slow the Democratic agenda if not defeat aspects of it. He has helped energize the Republican base, expose divisions among Democrats and turn the health care fight into a test of the Democrats' ability to govern.

"It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is O.K., they must have figured it out," Mr. McConnell said about the health legislation in an interview, suggesting that even minimal Republican support could sway the public. "It's either bipartisan or it isn't."

And despite this strategy, Obama's administration has accomplished more in two years than any other administration since the New Deal:

When the president took office, the failing U.S. health care system topped the list of long-deferred problems. More than 31 million Americans lacked insurance, and millions more had only inadequate insurance coverage.

So the president made health insurance reform a priority -- and the Affordable Care Act remains one of his proudest achievements. It ends the worst insurance industry practices and makes insurance more affordable for American families and businesses. As a result, all Americans will finally be able to get the care they need to live longer and healthier lives.

At the same time, the president has worked hard to put more Americans on the road to success -- adding on-ramps for low-income students, working women and others.

He increased federal Pell Grants and loans, capped student loan payments in keeping with graduates' incomes and passed new tax cuts to help students and their families pay for college. He gave women across the country his support in the fight to guarantee equal pay for equal work by signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. And he secured the repeal of the outdated and discriminatory "don't ask, don't tell."

The complete list of signed legislation up to this point - from whitehouse.gov can be viewed here, while a very comprehensive list of policy changes in every area from civil rights to energy policy to government efficiency can be viewed here.

So now the Democratic majority in the Senate is very seriously considering overhauling the filibuster processes to make it easier to get simple up or down votes on legislation. It will be the first time that the rules have been changed since 1975. But it won't be easy:

At some point on January 5, Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) will take the Senate floor and begin a process that he hopes will end in the successful use of the "Constitutional option" -- the prerogative of a majority of the Senate's members to rewrite its rules on the first day of a new Congress.

He and his allies have been vocal about their plan. But the actual sequence of events that starts with him giving a speech, and ends with filibuster reform, is obscure, fragile, and extremely complicated. In fact, it's so involved that the "first day" of the 112th Senate could actually last for weeks.

As it turns out, the road to filibuster reform goes straight through Vice-President Joe Biden, and so far he has not stated how he stands on this issue.

Read on for all the messy details and stay tuned for the starting line just around the corner on January 5th.

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