One of the most consistent themes we’ve raised here at Calitics in 2009 is the massively destructive impact of the 2/3rds rule. It has destroyed the ability of the state legislature to address California’s crippling economic problems, and has produced a political crisis worse than anything this state has seen since the last time state government was falling apart, on the eve of the Mexican War and the American conquest in the mid-1840s.

We’ve also been warning that, as usual, California was merely setting a trend that would soon affect the nation as a whole. As Paul Krugman realizes in today’s column, that trend has revealed itself on the floor of the US Senate:

[Health care reform] was, however, a close-run thing. And the fact that it was such a close thing shows that the Senate – and, therefore, the U.S. government as a whole – has become ominously dysfunctional…

Now consider what lies ahead. We need fundamental financial reform. We need to deal with climate change. We need to deal with our long-run budget deficit. What are the chances that we can do all that – or, I’m tempted to say, any of it – if doing anything requires 60 votes in a deeply polarized Senate?…

Nobody should meddle lightly with long-established parliamentary procedure. But our current situation is unprecedented: America is caught between severe problems that must be addressed and a minority party determined to block action on every front. Doing nothing is not an option – not unless you want the nation to sit motionless, with an effectively paralyzed government, waiting for financial, environmental and fiscal crises to strike.

This analysis could apply equally to the California State Senate (and to the Legislature as a whole) as it could to the United States Senate, which is getting a reputation for itself as the place good ideas go to die. The filibuster rule wasn’t as much of an issue before the far-right seized total control of the Republican Party, and began exploiting every undemocratic rule out there to reverse the fact that it is a party fundamentally unpopular with the American people in order to overturn the will of a more progressive majority.

Some folks, California Backward among them, look at this situation and think we can somehow change the electoral or redistricting rules and turn the political clock back to 1976, when there were still such things as moderate Republicans.

These views are little more than fantasies. They show either a dangerous lack of understanding of how deep and broad the right-wing nature of the modern Republican Party is – assuming it’s just a bunch of wackos gaming primaries in gerrymandered districts ignores the huge infrastructure and rivers of money that created and maintained the radical right – or they show a de facto complicity with movement conservatism, seeing it as a rightful and even desirable part of the political spectrum.

Some will probably react to the Krugman column the way the political establishment has reacted to the governance crisis here in California – by trying to find ways to achieve reforms without tackling the undemocratic supermajority rules.

Such efforts are doomed to failure and represent the triumph of hope over experience. In both Sacramento and in Washington DC we’ve seen the exploiters of supermajority requirements be coddled, accommodated, and appeased. Once Joe Lieberman got his pound of flesh, Ben Nelson was quick to do the same. Republican Senators may despise Abel Maldonado for his votes on the temporary tax increases in February 2009, but they respected and took lessons from his blackmail tactics. We can expect to see much more use, not less, of these supermajority rules by the minority to frustrate the will of a progressive majority and to in fact impose their own regressive agenda on the rest of us.

And so we come to the place we were at 100 years ago, when both California and national politics were dominated by corporations who had seized control of the political process by exploiting their financial advantage and loopholes in the system.

In 1910 California voters decided they’d had enough and elected progressive reformer Hiram Johnson as governor, given a mandate to push through sweeping reforms to break corporate power. As we know, over time those powers figured out how to manipulate the initiative, referendum and recall for their own purposes. But it’s only been in the last 30 years that the 2/3rds rule has hit with full force, and showing the need for change.

Partly as a result of the momentum generated in California in 1910 and 1911, as well as a long history of advocacy for reforms, the US Senate bowed to massive pressure in 1912 and approved the 17th Amendment, providing for direct election of US Senators. Previously, the US Senate had been controlled by plutocrats, sent there as the result of state legislatures bribed to ensure someone corporate-friendly would win the seat. (This happened often in California, including, some historians believe, in the election of railroad baron Leland Stanford to the US Senate in 1884.)

Just as major reforms of the process of government, including of the US Senate, was seen as a major goal of reformers who tried to break the power of concentrated wealth and stop it from eroding our democracy 100 years ago, so too must those reforms rise to the top of our own agenda as we close the book on one decade and enter another.

The 17th Amendment will turn 100 in 2013. Will progressives have been able to restore majority rule in both the California legislature and the US Senate by then? And if we do not, how the hell will we tackle the multiple crises that continue to engulf this country?