Darcy Burner played a big role in fixing the Senate filibuster

Virtually Speaking reports that Washington State’s Darcy Burner played an important role in Harry Reid’s move to fix the Senate filibuster.

Click here to hear filibuster experts Joan McCarter and David Waldman’s analysis.  Listen from 10:30 to hear the discussion of Darcy’s role. Here’s an excerpt:

To me Darcy Burner was instrumental in moving us from, “Hey, we really ought to be doing this” chat in emails to “Let me introduce you to the people who can make it happen.” And from there we took off running, and we all did this work together. But it was Darcy who said, “I can make this thought become reality.” So, she deserves a giant chunk of the credit for this today.

This CNN article has more detail about the filibuster change: And credit for the nuclear option goes to…

“It took a coordinated and sustained effort from an unlikely place — progressive activists on the blogosphere.”  The so-called Fix the Senate Coalition of groups and unions phoned and emailed senators. They pursued an “inside-outside” strategy of pressure from the grassroots and from insiders whom the senators trusted.

Darcy Burner on her facebook page offers this explanation of how filibuster reform came about (republished with permission):

David Waldman (aka KagroX of DailyKos) and I talked about it while I was running ProgressiveCongress.org, and then we convinced Daniel Weise of the Ordinary People Foundation to fund roughly a year of David’s time through ProgressiveCongress.org (in addition to his blogging at DailyKos.com) to lay the groundwork with the Senate. This is the ultimate outcome of that effort.

Lessons? (1) Small investments can make big differences if they’re strategically done. (2) Visionary donors – and Daniel qualifies – can have a huge impact. (3) We should be doing a better job of funding bloggers.