From The Economist: United States:

THE Senate likes to think of itself as the world’s greatest deliberative body. Of late, however, much of that deliberation has been devoted to its own rules. On October 6th Harry Reid, the leader of the Democratic majority, set tongues wagging with an unexpected manoeuvre that limited the minority’s ability to demand symbolic votes on doomed amendments. This, wailed Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, risked turning the Senate into the House of Representatives—a very bad thing, in senators’ eyes. He hinted at dire retaliation, should the Republicans win a majority at the next election. In short, the Senate’s usual procedural trench warfare has resumed.The trigger for the latest barrage was the jobs bill Barack Obama submitted to Congress last month. The Republicans were trying to force the Democrats to put it to a vote in its original form, presenting it as an amendment to a completely unrelated bill, in the hope that many of them would shy away from it, thus embarrassing the president. The Democrats, in turn, wanted to embarrass the Republicans by forcing them to use a different procedural manoeuvre,…

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