Filibuster Reform

A “filibuster” in the political sense is when a bill gets stuck in purgatory; it gets “talked about to death.” Yes, it happens more often than we might expect in the Senate. Yes, it is allowed. No, so far, there has not been a successful way to reform filibustering. Filibuster comes from the word filibusteros, a Spanish term that is used to describe plundering pirates of the 17^th century. Here, the term became synonymous with rebels and insurrectionists, a perfect way to describe a method used by defiant senators looking for ways to tangle legislation. The House of Representatives has a Rules Committee that places a limit on debate when a bill goes to the floor. The Senate hard money lenders has no such committee. As a result, a bill is informally scheduled to come up on the Senate floor where debate can be endless. A filibuster occurs when a Senator engaged in debate refuses to yield the floor and thus prevents a roll call vote from taking place. The image of a Senator standing his ground on the Senate floor is epitomized by Jimmy Stewart with his performance in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Filibusters provide a minority of Senators a way to make their voices heard. Such filibusters give a tremendous amount of power to individual senators. Senators have used the filibuster, or the threat to filibuster in order to maximize their leverage with the President or other Senators. In 1985, Oklahoma Senator David Boren held up Edwin Meese’s confirmation vote as Reagan’s Attorney General until Reagan agreed to sign an emergency farm relief bill. The application of this method, filibustering, has gotten more common in recent years. If you can believe it, roughly two-thirds of all filibusters in the Senate’s history have taken place in the last thirty years. These filibustering moves have been taken mostly to stop civil rights legislation from passing in the 1950s and 1960s. After microdermabrasion machines that time however, the filibuster tactic has been employed to stall bills of all kinds. This has led many to argue that filibustering has been trivialized. United States senators have resorted to filibusters every now and then for the last 170 years. So much so that the practice has been formalized: Senate rule number 22 states that a filibuster can be overridden only by a vote of 60 of the 100 senators. But the maneuver, once rare, has become predictable. That the state of things have remained the same, has stymied many bills that enjoyed popular support, and caused others such as the current president’s health-care reforms, to be watered down to meet the higher threshold. Even more terrible, for several decades now, recalcitrant senators have not even been required to go to the trouble of harping on for hours on end; all they had to do was signal their intention to filibuster, with no inconvenience. In December, before the new congress convened, all the returning Democratic senators metal detector wrote to Harry Reid, their leader, calling for a reform. Then again, calling for a change of rules is even tougher than overcoming a filibuster. It requires the approval of 67 senators—beyond the reach of the Democrats with their slim majority of 53. So three of them—Tom Harkin of Iowa, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, and Tom Udall of New Mexico—are proposing a procedural loophole to get around the rules. This hinges on an arcane debate about whether the Senate is a “continuing body,” always working under the same rules, or an intermittent assembly which is simply assumed to have adopted the rules prevailing in the previous Congress unless someone objects. That second, more informal theory, the tankless water heaters trio notes, seems more in keeping with the constitution. With their resolution to modify the rules, submitted, they contend, could be approved by a simple majority vote. It would leave unharmed the 60-vote threshold for breaching filibusters, but re-establish the requirement that filibustering senators actually take to the floor and talk until the majority gives up. The Senate is due to consider the measure next week. The Republicans, unsurprisingly, are up in arms. They dispute that the filibuster, although not mentioned in the constitution, is in keeping with the Founding Fathers’ objective that the Senate should be a more considerate, conservative body than the House of Representatives. They have only video camera stabilizer resorted to the filibuster so often, they add, because the Democrats have disallowed them from offering amendments to the bills in question (although the Democratic trio’s proposal would guarantee them at least three amendments on every bill). Additionally, they contend, the Democrats would be opening a can of worms by changing the rules with a simple majority: if the Republicans gain the upper hand at the next election, they would feel no compunction about doing the same.