America is witnessing, yet again, the funhouse-mirror effects that the filibuster exerts over the U.S. Senate. The popular national movement to set a $15 federal minimum wage was effectively derailed by one unelected Senate parliamentarian. As it happens, the parliamentarian was right: As crucially as America needs that living minimum wage (and it does), Democrats' attempt to attach it to the pandemic relief package made no logical sense outside the wackadoodle world of filibuster-avoidance politics. It's the latest example of the twisted machinations to which the majority party must always resort if it wants to get anything done. And still, they often fail.

This newspaper in the past has viewed the filibuster as a useful motivator for compromise, but today it's become the biggest wedge in the destructive polarization of government. It's time to talk seriously about eliminating the filibuster entirely. Another reminder of how pernicious the filibuster has become is the likelihood that an important House bill, the For the People Act, to strengthen federal voting rights also is dead on arrival because of a threatened Senate filibuster.

The Senate was established as a majority-rule body, just like the House. There's nothing in the Constitution about the filibuster — indeed, nothing that even implies a minority of senators should have veto power over the majority's agenda. That situation developed as the result of a clerical oversight in the early 1800s, when a revision of Senate rules inadvertently failed to include a process for cutting off floor debate. That, in turn, led to the storied image of the lone senator standing and speechifying for hours on end to halt all Senate business in defense of some noble principle. (Or some not-so-noble one, as when Southern senators filibustered civil rights legislation in the 1950s.)

The filibuster in modern times is routinely used as a strategic partisan lever by the minority party, which merely has to threaten to invoke it — no stand-up marathons required. To overcome a filibuster requires a supermajority of 60 out of the Senate's 100 members, instead of a simple majority of 51. In today's closely divided political universe, that almost always means the minority party has what amounts to a kill switch for most legislation that the majority wants to pass.

So stifling is the threat of the filibuster that complicated work-arounds have developed over the years, including the reconciliation process that was at the center of Senate drama over the minimum wage. Under that process, the controlling party can avoid the filibuster and pass three measures a year by a simple majority, but with a catch: Those measures have to be related to the federal budget. Inevitably, frustrated majority parties have taken to slipping their legislative wish lists into those budget measures — including issues that clearly have nothing to do with the budget — in order to circumvent the filibuster.

That's what Democrats were trying to do with the $15 minimum wage. That proposal is, again, crucial for America's workers, but it isn't a budget issue. Which is why the Senate's nonpartisan parliamentarian ruled Feb. 25 that it can't be part of the pandemic relief package that's protected from the filibuster.

That likely kills the minimum wage measure for the immediate future because the only other way to pass it would be as separate legislation, which would undoubtedly face a GOP filibuster. Polls show large majorities of Americans support the $15 minimum, and it would stand a realistic chance of winning a majority vote in the Senate. But because of the filibuster, that's not good enough. Just 41 Senate Republicans can stop it, and all 51 Democratic votes (looping in Vice President Kamala Harris) wouldn't change a thing about it.

To us, this situation strays far from the traditional ideal of representative democracy.

For all the lip service Senate institutionalists pay to the filibuster, both parties have been chipping away at it for years. In 2013, after Republicans repeatedly filibustered President Barack Obama's nominees, the Democratic Senate majority killed the filibuster for most presidential appointments, except Supreme Court nominees. When the Republican majority in 2017 moved to fill the Supreme Court vacancy they had held open for most of the final year of Obama's term, justifiably livid Democrats filibustered — so Republicans killed the filibuster for Supreme Court appointments as well.

Clearly, the era of respectful niceties is over. Hardball politics now holds sway in the Senate, which means Democrats will be trounced at every important turn if they keep playing by the old rules.

Now there's talk by majority Democrats of carving out still more exceptions for other specific types of legislation that would be deemed filibuster-exempt. If repeatedly making exceptions and tweaks to an arcane rule is the only way the Senate can get anything done, it's fair to ask whether it's time to get rid of the arcane rule.

Today, the paralyzing effects of the filibuster threaten the very functioning of government. The case for ending it is bigger than the minimum wage or any other individual policy issue. And it's bigger than either party. President Joe Biden and some Senate Democrats are reluctant to end the filibuster because they know the next time Republicans control the Senate, Democrats would be unable to thwart the GOP agenda. This is true and, given the current extremist direction of the GOP, worrisome. But it's not a valid argument for minority rule.

If and when Republicans next control the Senate, it will be because the voters willed it — which is exactly why elections have consequences. Under that circumstance, the GOP should be able to pursue its agenda. That's how representative democracy is supposed to work. And right now, because of the filibuster, it doesn't.

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