I’m sorry. I wasn’t clear. I was trying to say that the fillinuater wasn’t deliberate, but was an unintended consequence.
You still miss the point. The filibuster already existed from the beginning of the Senate. The whole point to creating a motion for cloture was to put an end to filibusters (assuming enough of the Senators, 2/3, agreed it was time to stop “debating” the issue).
And to answer the OP:
It is 60 senators because if 41 senators still think an issue is worth discussion, then the discussion continues.
What most people don’t understand is that the “nuclear option” isn’t the removal of cloture votes, but rather the further reduction of the number of senators needed to invoke cloture to 51 (from 60, and before that 67, or 2/3 of the number of senators, prior to 1961).
Being more deliberative does not equal the power to filibuster. Just because my group might agree that we should take things slow and talk about them does not mean that a minority of the group should have the power to talk and talk and talk about the issue forever in order to kill the proposal.
That power was a side effect of the Senate’s rules that became a seldom used power that a minority could bring out if they were really, really opposed to something. Now that it has turned into a 60 vote requirement, I believe that it is time to end it because that was not the intention.
Or the Senate could make a change to the rules to abolish the filibuster only under certain circumstances. Or they could just pretend that the rules don’t apply to the bill they’re passing. Or they could do both at once, as they did with the tax bill: There’s a rule that’s been in effect for a while now that only a simple majority is needed for any bill which decreases the deficit, through a process called “reconciliation”. Which they then applied to the tax bill, even though it would increase the deficit, because, basically, they said that it would only increase it a little, and that’s close enough.
You understand what “reconciliation” means (in this sense), right?
The filibuster came from the ability of Congress, both the House and the Senate, to move to the previous question, thereby ending debate with a simple majority. It took a while for people to fully understand the effect of all the rules and in 1805 Aaron Burr, possibly the best lawyer of the founding fathers, proposed a pruning of many unnecessary or redundant rules. As it happened, the Senate dropped the rule and the House did not. Even so, it took until 1837 for anyone in the Senate to realize the implications.
Neither side has ever really wanted to get rid of the filibuster despite the horrendous abuses. That was because both parties from the Civil War on had liberal, conservative, and moderate wings. It was simply assumed that a sufficient number of Senators from a like wing in the opposite party would agree that matters were getting out of hand. That’s how the Civil Rights Act finally got passed.
Wings no longer exist. Examinations of voting patterns have shown no overlap at all: every Republican is to the right of any Democrat and conversely every Democrat is to the left of any Republican. Filibusters are almost impossible in such an environment.
That’s today. Will the country eventually stop being polarized? It’s likely. Stable countries will work their way back to the middle over time. Whether that’s a case for getting rid of the filibuster now and reinstating it when the world changes is a long debate, and dependent on factors nobody can foresee.
The short answer is that the Republicans aren’t going to use the “nuclear option” as Trump put it, because the odds are too high they’ll be in the minority after this year’s election and there will be that hope, however slim, that a filibuster will be successful for them. It’s really the same psychology that meant that the U.S. has kept enough true nukes to destroy the world several times over despite continued calls for disarmament. That small what if? changes everything.
Actually, the possibility of the filibuster was not part of the Constitutional design of the Senate*, nor of the original rules of the Senate, and seems to have been created pretty much by accident in 1806. See The History of the Filibuster by Sarah Binder (senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and professor of political science at George Washington University).
*The Constitution, by providing for super-majority votes in one or both houses in certain specified circumstances–in both houses for a Constitutional amendment, or to override a presidential veto; in either house to expel a member; and in the Senate to convict an official who has been impeached in the House of Representatives, or to ratify a treaty with a foreign government–implicitly assumes that a simple majority vote (not a three-quarters vote or a two-thirds vote or a three-fifths vote) will be the normal threshold for passing legislation in either house of Congress. This is further reinforced by the provision giving the Vice President the power to break tie votes in the Senate. The Senate, having two members from each state, will always have an even number of members, and therefore there was the always the possibility from its inception that it might be deadlocked; hence the provision that the VP can break ties in the Senate. But that’s only a meaningful scenario if the Senate runs (except where otherwise specified in the Constitution) on majority-rules voting.
I agree, but the justifications for the filibuster are always that the Senate should be “calm” and “deliberative.” We always hear the Washington/Jefferson coffee in the saucer story.
That’s all great. I have no problem with that. We could have a default rule that every Senator gets 2 hours to speak their mind on a pending bill. Nobody gets their voice cut off when they have something important to say. But in every event, the debate should come to an end at some point.
Alternatively, we could have a House of Lords type procedure where if the Senate does not vote for cloture on a particular bill, that can delay it until the next session of Congress. But at that session we have a vote.
Our government has become dysfunctional because of the 60 vote requirement. Only in the most landslide of elections does one party have 60 votes in the Senate. Neither side can convince the people that their ideas are good and actually be able to implement them. No bill except the most uncontroversial (say naming a Post Office after someone) has a chance of passing.
If we had not done away with the 60 vote requirements for judicial nominations, the seat on the Supreme Court would still be vacant and likely remain that way forever, or at least until one party had a landslide 60 Senator election win. A winning party needs to govern, and the current rules do not allow it.
1806 is essentially the beginning of the Senate. Do you not recognize hyperbole when you see it? 
It is not the existence of the rule that creates the impasse, but rather the way in which the rule is used. The solution is not to remove the rule, but, rather, to change the way in which it is used.
This is so obviously untrue that I’m left a little breathless. What does anyone say to this except but… but… but…
At best you are wielding hyperbole like a superpower. But… With great wrongness comes great disbelief.
Our government became dysfunctional because of polarization. Period. The filibuster had nothing to do with it. Try a different argument.
You say that like it would have been a bad thing (as compared to the thing that it is).