It’s time, my fellow senators, that we returned the Congress of the United States of America to the very principles of democracy upon which this great country was founded. Democratic principles, my fellow senators. Democracy. If that word means anything—if it’s not just a word we toss around on the campaign trail—it means majority rule.

Majority rule. The minority does not hold the majority hostage in a democracy. A minority does not get to decide which bills are allowed to pass. That’s not democracy. And that’s why, in this body of 100 senators, it takes exactly 51 senators to pass a bill. Or it should. If you’ve been following the news lately, you’ve probably seen this question being asked again and again: “Will the Democrats have the 60 votes needed to get the bill passed in the senate?”

Sixty votes? How did the media get confused about what constitutes a majority of this body? We know exactly how it happened. A certain trick, a certain loophole in our parliamentary procedure, is being abused. It used to be rare for someone to actually exploit this maneuver, so rare that there has never been a serious movement to end it. But today? Filibustering is like speeding. Everybody does it! I’ve done it! Democrats do it when we’re in the minority. The Republicans are doing it now that they’re in the minority. We all understand how it got to this point. As long as we remain trapped in this cycle, our democracy loses. Our democracy is degraded. A minority calls the shots, our elections become a meaningless exercise, and the electorate becomes jaded and angry when no one—not Democrats, not Republicans—can deliver on their campaign promises.

It’s time to close the parliamentary loophole that enables the filibuster. And let’s remind ourselves what this parliamentary rule was supposed to do in the first place: It existed to ensure that everyone got a chance to speak. Because democracy is served when we have an open and honest debate about the merits of a proposed law. That’s what the rule was designed to do. And if we were using the rule to do that, my fellow senators, I wouldn’t be calling for this change. But now it is used to block legislation. Nowhere in the U.S. Constitution does it say that a minority of senators has a right to veto legislation. The power of the veto belongs to the president alone. So we must end the filibuster. We can replace it with something else, something that achieves the rule’s original purpose, something that extends debate for, say, a month. But after a month, a simple majority of this democratically elected body should be able to vote a bill up or down with the majority prevailing. That’s democracy.

I get it. I know why some of my fellow Democrats will object to ending—to killing—the filibuster. We opposed ending the filibuster when we were in the minority, and at that time frustrated Republicans were calling for the end of the filibuster. I was one of the biggest defenders of the filibuster back then! But let’s be honest: The party currently exploiting this loophole will always be against closing it because they’re the ones currently abusing it. Which is a damn good reason to close it.

Let’s remind ourselves what happened when the Republicans were in charge and they wanted to end the filibuster: We cut a deal where we Democrats agreed not to filibuster some of their conservative judges and they agreed not to close the loophole. Now does anyone think that they would be willing to cut us the same deal now? Does anyone think that the Republicans and their conservative allies in our own caucus would be willing to let a real health-care bill come to a vote in exchange for “saving” the filibuster? No! Would they be so foolish as to agree to save the filibuster on the condition that they don’t use it? No!

Take health-care reform. Here’s a bill that was once so popular that some on the right feared its passage would guarantee Democratic gains in the 2010 midterm elections! Their only hope was to obstruct as much as possible, to block health-care reform or use the threat of the filibuster to cram a bad bill down our throats, a bill they could hang around our necks in the midterms. And it worked! We are about to pass a health-care-reform bill that pisses everyone off, liberals and conservatives, a bill that won’t solve our health-care crisis and will delegitimize any future effort to solve it. And this bill, crafted to avoid the threat of a filibuster, could wind up costing us our majority in the Senate—and if we lose control of the Senate, do you think the Republicans will respect our right to use the filibuster to thwart their agenda? Of course not! They will threaten to get rid of it—again—unless we agree—again—not to use it.

So let’s get rid of it now so that no one can use it.

If we’re worried about the Republicans making gains in the midterm elections, if we’re worried about getting reelected, we need some big wins now. We need to come through on our campaign promises and pass some meaningful legislation that will help Americans get back on their feet. And we can’t do that while letting a minority subvert the democratic process. It’s time to stand up for democracy. It’s time to close the filibuster loophole once and for all.

David Mitsuo Nixon is a professor at the University of Washington in Bothell. Sometimes when he’s pissed off, he imagines the speech he would give if he were a politician. This is one of those speeches.