As I understand it (from last night’s Rachel Maddow show) the use of the filibuster has skyrocketed since 2006, when the Republicans became a minority party. In theory, it’s a legistlative tool that could be employed by any minority party to block legislation from coming up for a vote, but the Republicans seem much more able to employ it. Why?
I’m asking this in GQ rather than GD because I think there’s some sort of factual (if political) answer here, and that’s what I’m interested in knowing. I.e. I’m NOT interested in hearing “Cuz Pubbies are EEEVIL” or “Cuz Liberals are wussies” but simply what enables the Republicans to use this tool so much more effectively than Dems. If Bushies were to have proposed some legislation that the Dems opposed as a minority party, what held them back from filibustering? Why were the Dems unable to demand a de facto 60 vote supermajority to pass legislation, as the Pubbies are doing with health care now?
Basically, the Republicans decided to use it as a normal strategy when they couldn’t defeat the issue. In the past, the minority party was willing to let some things go and save the filibuster for major legislation they opposed. The Republicans decided to use the threat for any bill they opposed. They are also much more monolithic than parties have been in the past, so they can agree to get together with few defections.
A third factor is that filibusters aren’t filibusters any more: people don’t have to stand up and talk in order to filibuster; they just say that their party is planning one. It’s sort of like that Star Trek episode with that computer-controlled war – it makes the process so convenient that the threat is much stronger.
I know you say you don’t want this, but I’ll give you the real reason: Harry Reid is a wuss.
I’d like to note, also, that when the Republicans were the ones in power, they threatened to do away with the filibuster (the “nuclear option”), because the Democrats had the audacity to use it for what they considered important things (judicial appointments), and they would have if a small coalition of moderate senators from both parties hadn’t worked a deal. But when the Democrats come to power, the Republicans suddenly found that they LOVED the filibuster.
Well, as far as I’m concerned, jayjay, your language may have been intemperate for GQ but if your analysis is that it is purely a matter of the peculiar temperaments and personalities of the Democratic leadership, that’s a legitimate answer. I’m interested in seeing other possible, more procedural-based analyses, but it may be that weakness of character is the best analysis. I’d be most interested in hearing a wider range of possible answers, however.
What Maddow says is misleading. There has a been a general trend towards an increased use of filibusters over time - she’s just looking at the change in majority and pretending this represents an abrupt change.
See the NY Times for an article on the general subject, and the (conservative) National Review for an article complaing about the increased use of the filibuster by Democrats, back in 2003.
Wait… so they don’t even have to go to the trouble of talking? Just threatening to is enough to change the number of votes? Wha—? How is this possible? Can’t the other party say, “hey, you didn’t actually get up there and speechify, so it doesn’t count and we’re going with the 51”?
What is the point of this ridiculous rule in the first place? Why reward time-wasting and obstruction?
Before a vote on a bill happens there is a floor discussion. With a threat of a filibuster the majority party will not bring a mater up for floor discussion where the filibuster will kill the bill. It causes the majority party to comprimise with the minority party to remove the threat of the filibuster. It is one way of forcing the majority party include the minority party other wise we would end up with a one party house and senate.
Last time I looked at the numbers she used, they were skewed a bit. She was counting the number of ‘no’ cloture votes as being synonymous with filibusters, but they aren’t.
I believe the core of the problem here is that the whole filibuster is only necessary if there is a quorum of senators in the chamber at the time. Otherwise nothing can happen and no filibuster is needed. This gives a big advantage to the filibustering party, since nothing happening is exactly what they want.
As a result of the above, an actual filibuster would actualy be more exausting for the majority than for the filibustering minority. Because the former would have to keep enough members in the chamber for a quorum at all times. The latter could get by with a rotation that has only a few members on hand at any given time.
So it’s in the interests of the majority to go along with the technical filibuster rather than force an actual one.
Not really. If you don’t have 60 votes for a measure, as the majority party you know you can’t cut off the debate, so you have two options:
Sit there 24 hours per day listening to someone talk about nonsense or
Give up and move on to other things.
Keep in mind that this isn’t like Jimmy Stewart all by himself. If you can’t get 60 votes, then you’ve got at least 41 Senators who can take shifts talking and keep it up forever…
And remember, too, that just because there’s a “D” after the name doesn’t necessarily mean that the senator in question agrees with party leadership. There is a handful of Democratic senators who are likely to hold up any healthcare reform bill, despite the fact that there are 60 Democratic senators. For ever Ted Kennedy or Al Franken, there’s an Evan Bayh or a Max Baucus (or a Mary Landrieu or a Ben Nelson or a Blanche Lincoln).
To spell out what’s obvious to most politically savvy Americans for the benefit of non-Americans and those who are not clear on the theory and practice of filibusters, the U.S. Senate’s standing rules put no limit to how long any Senator or group of Senators may debate a bill before it nor any limits to what they may speak on. This has traditionally been used, sparingly, by one or a small group of Senators to block passage of a measure they are really strongly opposed to by standing up and speaking at length – sometimes days at length – when it comes up for floor debate, including reading aloud the phone book listings or whatever strikes their fancy to just keep talking. This may be overcome by a motion and vote of cloture, to close out debate, which takes a 3/5 (60 vote) majority. Senators are loath to vote cloture because it is a valuable tool for the individual senator, when used as sparingly as in the past, to overcome the ‘tyranny of the majority.’
It’s being obstructionist, to be sure – but on occasion, being obstructionist is the right thing to do, when being obstructionist is preventing some major injustice from being done by a group acting intemperately without thinking it through. The filibuster has a bad name recently because over the last 50 years or so its major use has been by Southern Senators to prevent civil rights legislation passing, and more recently threats to filibuster have been used by Republicans to prevent Democrat-sponsored legislation.
It only takes one or a very few Senators to conduct a filibuster. The 60-vote bit does not mean 41 Senators are ready to filibuster – it just means that they cannot pull together 60 Senators who are prepared to vote cloture and block a filibuster on that one particular issue. And knowing the history of its use, good and bad, and the value it can have in delaying popular but perhaps unwise measures, Senators regard voting cloture as something of a ‘nuclear option’ – to be used only when truly necessary. 41 Senators unwilling to vote cloture doesn’t even necessarily mean there are 41 Senators opposed to the measure facing threat of filibuster. It’s the Golden Rule in negative form at work: “Stifle not thy brother Senator, lest thou too be stifled in turn.”
The quick and sometimes brutal tyranny of the majority in a pure democracy vs. the plodding inefficiency of a representative democratic republic
Our government is inefficient by design; the idea is to make it more difficult for one person or party to ram through legislation that is poorly thought out on a whim or in a knee-jerk reaction to current events.
No matter how you slice it, the answer to the OP is that there hasn’t been any rule change in the last 10 years that accounts for the difference if it exists. It has been a tactical/strategic decision by the various parties involved.
In the early days of the Senate, there was a misinterpretation of the motion of the Previous Question and thus it is not in the Senate Rules. Given that the rules do allow for unlimited time to debate, there was the possibility that 1 senator could filabuster, thus the Senate implemeted the cloture rule requiring a 2/3 (now 3/5) majority.
Why they simply did not include the motion of Previous Question as a new rule, I do not know.
I don’t know of any court challenges to it; certainly no successful ones. It’s deeply rooted in Senate custom and practice, and any court that found such a case dropped in its lap would almost certainly dismiss it as a political question.
What article of the constitution would you construe as preventing it? Note that various forms of this legislative tactic have a long history (longer than the actual term “filibuster”), and it is hardly unique to the US. In the UK Parliament, bills are said to be “talked out”. The wiki article claims that it was used in Ancient Rome by Cato the Younger: