Finally, something we agree on:

“In the Senate, the architects gave certain protections for the minority. Minority is protected in the Senate with the ability to give a filibuster,” he added. “Now, in recent years the minority party in Senate has begun to use the filibuster willy-nilly – it has become a culture where the minority party has overstepped its power, the reason we have allowed this to be the case is because the Republican Party has not had the fortitude to say, ‘If you’re going to threaten a filibuster, then you have to actually conduct it.’

“That flies in face of what our Founding Fathers had in mind – we should protect minority in the proper way that the Senate was set up to function,” Nieves added. “They should be given the ability to exercise the right to filibuster in the Senate, but Republican majority has to, not with bad attitude, say ‘Go ahead.’ When they are done we can continue moving on – we won’t just instantly fold and compromise because of a threat of a filibuster.”

And why stop with the State Senate? Let’s have the same reforms in the U.S. Senate rules too. The GOP earned its moniker of “The Party of No” during the last two years for its legendary abuse of the filibuster. In fact, the constant threat of it is probably the single biggest reason the health care reform bill ended up as weak as it has. Without the Senate Republicans threatening to “filibuster willy-nilly” we may have gotten a public option and the Federal mandate would have been nixed. Instead, we got a watered-down law that mostly benefits private insurers by forcing millions to buy health insurance from them — thanks in part to a “tyranny of the minority.”

Republicans have a 26-8 majority over Democrats in the State Senate and a 106-57 majority over Democrats in the House. They have a clear mandate of the People. Let them govern without restraint and let voters hold them accountable at the ballot box for their actions. If they make a mess of things (and I’m counting on it) they can’t point fingers at Democrats.

By the same token, when Democrats are in the majority, the same rules should apply.