I caught Sam Seder filling in for Keith Olbermann this week and it was a real treat, one because I’ve been a fan of his work from his days on the Majority Report with Janeane Garofalo right up to his commentaries on calling BS on right-wing propaganda against immigrants and two because he was discussing the movement to reform the fillibuster rules in the Senate that ended up killing the DREAM Act in the last lame duck congressional session:

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As you may recall, the DREAM Act received a majority vote in the Senate vote of 55-41 and yet it failed to move forward.  Why?  Because it didn’t reach the 60 vote threshold to invoke cloture to pre-emptively kill a potential fillibuster against the DREAM Act.  The problem is that that’s not the whole story with what happened.  Should the DREAM Act been brought up to a vote earlier in the year, there would have been enough time to actually call their bluff and force any Senator that wanted to kill the DREAM Act to do an actual real-live fillibuster and be broadcasted to all the Latino voters to see that Senator’s bigotry exposed in all its glory.  On the flip side, should the fillibustering not been abused by Republicans, we wouldn’t be talking about reforming it today and should the fillibuter rules been reformed earlier, a simple majority would have been sufficient for passage and today the DREAM Act would have been the law of the land.  A lot of “if’s” of course, but let’s make sure that the we’re not back here in the coming years facing the same “if’s” yet again.