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Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the number two man in the Senate Democratic leadership and a close ally of President Obama’s, is behind a move by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, to reform Senate rules so as to not require 60 votes for every measure to proceed to a full vote.

"The Harkin proposal would officially amend the process by which a filibuster is broken, allowing a four-step process that could eventually allow it to be broken by a majority vote," Sargent writes. "The first vote would require 60 votes to break the filibuster, followed by motions requiring 57, 54, and finally, 51 votes. The key is that Durbin is apparently playing an active role in backing the Harkin effort."

Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., didn’t seem to think such a move was likely. As Paul Kane of the Washington Post noted, the high hurdle for Harkin’s reform is that changing the rules requires 67 votes, so eight Republicans would need to "join the 59 members of the Democratic caucus to alter the rules, something Reid said is not going to happen.

"I'm totally familiar with his idea," Reid said Harkin’s proposal. "It takes 67 votes, and that, kind of, answers the question."

But what does the White House think?

The president has expressed frustration at how often Republicans have required Democrats to achieve 60 votes since becoming the minority party after the November 2006 elections.

In December, interviewed by Jim Lehrer on PBS’s NewsHour, the president said, "as somebody who served in the Senate, who values the traditions of the Senate, who thinks that institution has been the world's greatest deliberative body, to see the filibuster rule, which imposes a 60-vote supermajority on legislation - to see that invoked on every single piece of legislation, during the course of this year, is unheard of. I mean, if you look historically back in the '50s, the '60s, the '70s, the '80s - even when there was sharp political disagreements, when the Democrats were in control for example and Ronald Reagan was president - you didn't see even routine items subject to the 60-vote rule."

The president said "if this pattern continues, you're going to see an inability on the part of America to deal with big problems in a very competitive world, and other countries are going to start running circles around us. We're going to have to return to some sense that governance is more important than politics inside the Senate. We're not there right now."

He suggested that if the 60-vote requirement is "used prudently, then I don't think it's harmful for our democracy. It's not being used prudently right now. And my hope would be that whether a senator is in the majority or is in the minority, that they're starting to get a sense, after looking at this year, that this can't be the way that government runs."

UPDATE: Sen. Tom Udall, D-NM, has indicated that he plans to challenge the filibuster under Senate rules during the new congress next January.

If Udall's proposal works, the rules would change so that ending the filibuster would only require a simple Senate majority.

Wrote Udall: “While I am convinced that our inability to function is our own fault, we have the authority within our Constitution to act.

"Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution states, 'Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings...' Yet, at the beginning of the 111th Congress, unlike in the House of Representatives, there was no vote on a package of rules that would govern the body for the two years that comprises a term of Congress.

"As a result, 96 of my colleagues and I (three senators had an opportunity to vote on the last change to the rules in 1975) are bound by rules put in place decades ago and make conducting the business of the Senate nearly impossible.

"When the authors of the Constitution believed a supermajority vote was necessary, they clearly said so. And while the Constitution states that we may determine our own rules, it makes no mention that it require a supermajority vote to do so.

"In addition, a longstanding common law principle, upheld in Supreme Court decisions, states that one legislature cannot bind its successors. To require a supermajority to change the rules, as is our current practice, is to allow a Senate rule to trump our U.S. Constitution and bind future Senates. This should not be.”

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