3.) The Dean of the Senate is defined as the serving Senator, who is not the President pro Tempore, with the longest continuous service in the Senate in his or her present stint of service. For the purposes of this clause, continuous service begins at the moment of swearing-in in the first term of the stint of service. The Dean of the Senate may pass the title, powers and responsibilities of the Dean of the Senate, to the next longest serving Senator for any reason whatsoever.
I can't speak for the Senate but it's been generally assumed (bad word, bad practice, I know) that all opportunities for the Dean to delegate their responsibilities would be on a temporary basis. OTOH, Razze has never actually delegated his own duties away on either a temporary or permanent basis within my personal recollection.
Poirot once proposed a bill to bypass the Dean for administration of the Speaker elections if the Dean was inactive, which sort of falls under this purview and is illustrative of what it would have entailed: basically the next-most senior representative would take over and yield responsibilities back to the Dean as soon as the vote was over. It never passed obviously but that was the mindset we were working with.
Re: the cloture threshold, I think two-thirds makes marginally more sense. From a theoretical standpoint this will bring it in line with the threshold for a tabling vote; it should not be easier for a bad piece of legislation to be muscled through than for a bad piece of legislation to be tabled. Three-fifths in the current Senate is either ten or eleven people and, in my view, rather too close to the majority for comfort.
