I’m afraid I have to put this article in the “Sore losers want to change the rules” category. Mitch McConnell has the backing of a majority of his caucus. He is no more awful than any of them, just better at it. He needs to be defanged by an opposition that knows how to fight back. Lyndon Johnson would not have allowed the Senate to become the joke it now is. The Dems need more effective leaders than Obama, Reid, and Schumer. They’ve been outplayed, or complicit, and the rules are not the problem.

On the contrary, changing the rules is what got us in this mess. The Senate decided — it does not matter under which party, because both parties have controlled the Senate since the event — to make the filibuster virtual. No more Mr. Smith standing to exhaustion to oppose a bill he felt worth the trouble to defeat by hard work. All we have to do is restore the filibuster to its time-honored role as a last-ditch, politically and personally taxing undertaking, and most of the problem in the Senate would be solved. But neither party wants to do that, because the current rule makes all senators more powerful as vetoers, whereas the old rule only made the majority more powerful as legislators. And they all expect to be in the minority sometime. Shame on all of them. But the VP can’t fix that.

Changing rules has consequences. The upshot of the change in the filibuster rule, in my opinion, is a Congress that gets nothing done, or, when it gets something done, the thing is sabotaged as Obamacare was. So we get a Congress with a 19% approval rating and the sense among the electorate that we need to “shake things up,” like by electing Jabba the Trump as President. Great rule change, guys.

Meanwhile, if you think Mitch McConnell could have done to LBJ what he did to BHO, raise your hand, and then go to your room. Johnson would have had the filibuster back in its cage ASAP. He’d have twisted arms, kicked ass, and taken names. And with Twitter to add to his arsenal? Yikes. The Dems don’t even need the Senate to do this. All they need is the House. Just pass good laws in the House and beat the GOP about the head and ears for not offering something better.

For example, Mitch offers lame excuses for opposing the vote-hardening legislation that came out of the House. Let’s suppose that there is some Democratic over-reaching in the bill. (Stranger things have happened.) There is no reason to expose his caucus to having to vote against a bill with such good PR, so he is right not to bring it to a vote. But where is his bill? That’s what gives away his game. All he has to do is edit the House Bill into something that doesn’t overreach, pass it, move it to conference, negotiate something in good faith, and put it on President Putin’s desk. Then, as the orange menace likes to say, we’ll see what happens.

We here on the Interwebs have grown comfortable with Hanlon’s Razor. We should expand it to cover rule changes. Let’s not attribute to bad rules what can be attributed to incompetence. The VP’s power may be “in” the Constitution, but the de facto “rules” are that the VP do what VPs have always done. Exercising powers that have never been exercised would be “changing the rules.” There is no need to do that. The Dems need only want a Senate that works more than they want one that they will want to obstruct when it is their turn in the minority.