As the Senate limps toward a final vote by Christmas on health-care reform, the rush and the rancor involved assure that the package that goes under the nation's yuletide tree will fully please no one and will confuse practically everybody.

The Democrats' push to collect the 60 votes to detour a Republican filibuster, apparently successful, together with the GOP's obstructionism have painted a dismal picture of textbook democracy at work, with lobbyist money flowing freely to each side.

Procedural gamesmanship in the Senate threatens the horrible consequence that many of the annoyed senators may actually have to make a Christmas Eve dash home by plane, train or even jammed highway to join their families. An even worse scenario could find them stranded in Washington on the big day. Such is the ultimate awful price of public service.

The assignment of blame is bipartisan. The Democrats, prodded by their leader in the White House, are driven by President Obama's call for a Senate health care package by Christmas, though negotiations with the House are certain to continue well beyond.

The Republicans, having already cemented their title as the Party of No on all manner of Obama initiatives, are counting on scare tactics about the bill's implementation and alleged costs to overcome their lack of an alternative.

In all this, the White House is paying a price for its early decision to leave it to the Democratic congressional leadership to come up with the detailed answer to a health care system denying coverage to millions of Americans while bankrupting the country.

Obama's late weighing in as a cajoling force has failed to budge the calculated Republican obstinacy or avoid legislative blackmail by individual Democratic senators gaming their votes for concessions on issues and/or constituent advantages.

Players like Democrat-turned-independent Joe Lieberman succeeded in putting the final bullets in the public option and Medicaid extension proposals, and Democrat Ben Nelson forced the weakening of abortion rights and hijacked the bill for money sweeteners to Nebraska.

The obvious critical element in the whole dustup is the requirement of 60 votes in the Senate as the tollgate to enactment there. The filibuster, once reserved for the defense of racial segregation in the then-solid Democratic South in what members considered the "upper body," was the trigger for some of the great Senate debates on civil rights legislation. Stalling tactics were a key, but also much light was shed on the nation's most enduring domestic disgrace and embarrassment.

This time around, the threat of filibuster in a sense has not involved any such grand and noble human social issue as the end of segregation. Though denial of health care to the poor and uninsured is also a national disgrace, the current fight has been cast in terms of such matters as doctors' rights, the rights of the unborn, and a host of programmatic details that blur the prime worthy objective.

The 60-vote rule on imposing cloture — the closing of debate to enable voting on the particular legislation at hand — has been in force since 1975. That's when a previous, more stringent rule — requiring two-thirds of all present and voting senators to end a filibuster — was modified. At that time, the Senate filibuster record, still standing, was held by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who spoke for 24 hours and 12 minutes to block the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

Except concerning civil rights, the two opposing parties in the Senate over the last half-century had mostly managed to avoid using the filibuster, thanks to a more congenial atmosphere. But the hardening of partisanship has changed that.

In 2005, when minority Democrats were blocking Republican judicial nominations, then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist proposed using a "nuclear option" to kill the filibuster by having Vice President Dick Cheney, as president of the Senate, declare its use on such matters unconstitutional. Only a bipartisan compromise agreement by 14 Senate moderates averted that threat.

So the 60-vote hurdle continues to complicate Obama's legislative agenda and enables the now-minority Republicans to keep saying no, at the risk of their own credibility.