James Fallows on the Senate Filibuster
He writes:
The filibuster: let's talk about it - James Fallows: [C]ontrary to the tone of most day-by-day political reportage, [the filibuster] is not some timeless feature of American constitutional design. In newspaper accounts, you read things like this [by Robert Pear]....
In the past 25 years, something that was an exceptional, last-ditch measure has turned into a damaging routine.... For most of the first 190 years of the country's operation, U.S. Senators would, in unusual circumstances, try to delay a vote on measures they opposed by "filibustering" -- talking without limit or using other stalling techniques. For most of those years, the Senate could cut off the filibuster and force a vote by imposing "cloture," which took a two-thirds majority of those voting (at most 67 of 100 Senators). In 1975, the Senate adopted a rules change to allow cloture with 60 votes, and those are the rules that still prevail. The significant thing about filibusters through most of U.S. history is that they hardly ever happened. But since... the early Clinton years, the... filibuster has gone from exception to routine... the aberrational nature of this change should not be overlooked.... Talk shows analyze exactly how the Administration can get to 60 votes; they don't discuss where the 60-vote practice came from and what it has done to public life.... [T]his isn't a partisan question -- even though in any given administration it presents itself as one.... Also for the record, as the chart below shows, the huge increase in threatened filibusters came from the Republican minority, after the Democrats took back the Senate in 2007. Since the time covered by this chart, the number of threatened (Republican) filibusters has shot up even more dramatically...
