The Hill News

Democrats will make an attempt to reform the Senate's filibuster rules, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said Wednesday.

Brown said that his party was likely to seek changes to long-standing Senate rules that require 60 votes (instead of a simple majority of 51) to advance most pieces of legislation in the chamber.

"I think you're going to see attempts to do that," Brown said of the prospects for filibuster reform this morning on MSNBC.

The filibuster, or at least an implicit threat of one, has been used to great effect in the past two years by Senate Republicans to slow down or flat-out block pieces of legislation favored by Democrats.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), a high-profile congressional liberal, is expected to address the need for filibuster reform in a speech at the National Press Club this morning, as well.

Even though Democrats had controlled 60 seats on their own for some time during this past session of Congres! s, they couldn't always get all of their members on-board with some of their largest agenda items.

Sen. Scott Brown's (R-Mass.) election in a special election in January of 2009 gave Republicans a 41st vote, and an ability to sustain a filibuster against any piece of legislation, as long as all members of the GOP held together.

Republicans' willingness to filibuster legislation has led to several options for reform that Senate Democrats have studied. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) has held meetings on the idea, and the options for reform include ideas ranging from requiring senators to speak continuously during an actual filibuster to lowering the threshold of votes that can end a filibuster.

"We still want to protect the rights of the minority in the Senate," Brown said, noting that his own party's southern members had inappropriately used the filibuster to try and block Civil Rights bills in the 1950s and 60s.

Still, it could! be difficult to secure any agreement to change the rules. Und! er Senat e protocol, 67 senators would have to agree to change filibuster rules, meaning that at least nine GOP senators would have to vote for a change. That could be especially difficult, considering Republicans are still in the minority in the Senate in the next two years.

Democrats' window to achieve filibuster reform is rapidly closing, too. They're rushing to finish tax cuts, an immigration bill, a nuclear arms treaty and a repeal to the military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy before the new Congress is sworn in on Jan. 5. That next Congress will include many more Republicans in the Senate, who are probably even more disinclined to support a change in the filibuster rules.

Brown lamented that his party didn't seek filibuster reform at an earlier point in the last two years.

"Maybe we could have" done filibuster reform earlier, he said. "We were working on other things."