JOHN COURSON was livid. He had just watched as minute after agonizing minute — nearly 300 of them — ticked off the clock while yet another of the all-too-common mini-filibusters tied the Senate in knots, this time leaving it helpless to take up scores of bills that would have become law this year had those precious minutes not been squandered.

“This is going to be the precursor of huge rules changes,” the senator declared as the gavel fell on a singularly disappointing session. “This is unconscionable.”

Sen. Courson was not alone in his frustration over the latest abuse of a set of rules noble in origin but so badly abused in recent years as to have lost all claim to virtue. And the company he keeps, led by Sen. Glenn McConnell, is so impressive that the most antiquated and anti-democratic of the rules are almost certain to fall, ushering in a new era in the Senate — and therefore in the General Assembly and the state as a whole.

The idea behind the abused rules was that the majority should never be able to take action without considering the views of the minority. And unless the majority was overwhelming, it should have to incorporate at least some of the minority’s ideas into its own.

But the rules were drawn for a simpler time, when senators shared a code of honor, if only among themselves. Such rules work only as long as a senator’s word and motives can be trusted.

They no longer can be.

No one has been a more fierce defender of Senate rules and traditions than Mr. McConnell, whose mastery of both has given him awesome parliamentary power and earned him universal respect within the body and the lofty title of president pro tempore of the Senate. But after years of insisting that a little tinkering with the Senate’s rules or habits could overcome mounting problems that seemed so obvious to many outsiders, Mr. McConnell now concurs: Change must come.

“The Senate,” he says sadly, “has become too contentious now to operate on the old system.”

Mr. McConnell and other critics charge that a handful of senators used trumped-up concerns about a gubernatorial appointment as a ruse last Thursday to block final passage of other bills they opposed. Worse, they contend that some senators had drawn out the confirmation battle for months, deceptively claiming they simply needed time to get questions answered, when they had no intention of ever giving in.

But while it may have shaped other senators’ positions, this last-minute ploy merely provided an exclamation point for Mr. McConnell, who already had accepted the inevitable truth.

Ironically, it may have been Mr. McConnell’s own famous dilatory success that convinced him changes must be made. When he was fighting to stop the Senate from taking a vote on a stricter seat belt law, Mr. McConnell says, supporters brought word that they had the votes needed (28 of 46 senators) to end the filibuster, so long as Mr. McConnell wasn’t the one holding the floor at the time. So he sat down and let other senators filibuster. And he sat. And he sat.

For five days he sat; he put up the least popular senators on his team. A vote was taken. It fell short of the promised 28. Another vote was taken. It, too, fell short. Mr. McConnell was then able to convince his colleagues to move on, because of mounting evidence that several senators who claimed to support the seat belt law were secretly working to sustain the filibuster so the Senate couldn’t get to tort reform legislation.

“What’s happening, sadly, is that our rules have started to be used not just against a particular bill but to block us from getting to other things,” Mr. McConnell told me last week. “When I came here the debate rules were used to make sure the concerns of the minority were incorporated into the view of the majority. Now, filibusters are used to keep from even getting to a bill.” The filibuster rule “has become a blocking mechanism rather than a holding mechanism.”

Mr. McConnell’s determination to plug a loophole the House has learned to exploit to force Senate debate on certain issues is to be expected. It is his goal of finding a way to “allow us to get to things” and to “allow extended debate, but allow us to come to a conclusion” that signals a dramatic break. That means changing the tradition that allows a single senator to block debate on a bill without a two-thirds override and the rule that allows opponents to block a vote on contentious legislation without 28 of 46 votes. The single-senator blockade is the most offensive thing that happens in the Senate, and it has been used to carry out personal vendettas and to try to force action on unrelated legislation.

Mr. Courson predicts the Senate will increase the number of senators needed to block debate and reduce the number needed to force a vote. But Mr. McConnell is toying with less blunt solutions, including my favorite — a sliding scale. That might mean a single senator could block debate for a day, but that with each passing day the number of senators required to block debate would increase. Once the debate starts, it could mean that after a set time — say a week — the number of votes needed to end a filibuster and take a vote would decrease.

Whatever precise shape the changes take, Mr. McConnell promises to be true to Senate traditions. Hearkening back to his famous, larger-than-life predecessor, he says: “All I can do is try to think of what Senator Gressette would have done.”

“We need to keep the deliberative nature,” he said. “But we have to change.”

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.