> I don't understand who would do the tackling, since no senator is ever
> going to do it.
Quite apart from anything we would recognize as politics, there are career- related reasons for senators to like supermajority rules.
It's an institution with a small membership, very much devoted to personal aggrandizement and really not very concerned, most of the time, with policy. For any given senator, a supermajority rule increases the likelihood that he personally will be needed to pass a bill.
If the sponsors only need 51, there's only a 50/50 chance that they'll need you. But if they need 60, then there's a 60/40 chance that they'll need you, and your opportunities to extract a pound of flesh in exchange for your vote become more numerous.
In principle, this line of reasoning ought to apply to larger deliberative bodies too, like the House, but maybe it doesn't scale linearly, for some reason.
I don't know the background on the reduction from 666 -- sorry, 66 -- to 60. Probably pretty interesting.
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Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com