Yesterday’s confirmation of Chris Schroeder to head the Office of Legal Policy was a welcome break in the gridlock that GOP senators have created over President Obama’s Executive Branch nominees. (Though, as has become the pattern, they made sure Schroeder’s confirmation was held up for nearly a year before allowing it to easily pass in a 72-24 vote).

The GOP’s recent unprecedented abuse of procedural stalling tactics has Senators and observers scrambling for ways to amend filibuster rules to get the Senate working again.

In the Washington Post this morning, Ruth Marcus details her ideas on reforming the filibuster while maintaining the power of the minority to have a strong voice in the Senate, and Ezra Klein outlines the enormous time-wasting potential of the current rules.

And Chuck Schumer, chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, has launched a (sure to be smash hit) series of hearings on filibuster reform. At this morning’s hearing, there was some especially interesting testimony from the Brookings Institution’s Sarah Binder, who debunked the widely held idea that the Founding Fathers meant the Senate to be deliberative to the point of inaction.

The filibuster clearly has worthy uses (as anyone who’s seen Mr. Smith Goes to Washington knows), but it’s clearly wrong to imply that the Senate’s inventors intended the sort of obstruction that we see today.

Stanley Bach, a former legislative specialist at the Congressional Research Service who testified at this morning’s hearing, put it this way: “A useful starting point [to discussions of reform] is to ask whether the usual purpose of filibusters is more balanced legislation or no legislation at all.”

These days, the answer to that seems pretty clear.