So I understand what a filibuster is and how it works in practice. A filibuster is when a politician intentionally speaks as long as possible during debate to prevent a vote on legislation. And I know in practice, it means that any legislation needs 60 votes for cloture to end debate and bring legislation to a vote.
But my question is, how? Is the belief that every member of the minority party will take turns filibustering and delay the legislation for days if not weeks and derail the rest of the agenda? I’m trying to bridge the concept of a politician sitting in the pulpit for 12 hours reading off a phone book and how it works in practice where they vote for cloture and then give up if it doesn’t reach 60 votes. Can they just say they want to keep debate open and sit there unless the senate majority leader either calls for cloture or moves on to another bill?
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Yes that is pretty much it a fillibuster is just wasting time to not allow a vote until enough of the other side just gets sick of it and leaves that you can have the vote in your favour. It used to just be a test of endurance for how much you actually cared about that bill. With the modern usage they really should just change the threshold you need to pass something to 60% and stop wasting everyone’s time.
You pretty much understand things. Getting a little more detailed – each chamber sets its own rules for moving a bill through the process. In the House, debate is time-limited. You will hear Congresscritters say “I yield the remainder of my time…”. In the Senate, debate remains open until a cloture vote passes. If the cloture vote doesn’t pass, the bill in theory sits there in “debate” status until that session adjourns the last time and new Senators are seated.
There are situations where the Senate has changed the rules to allow cloture with only 50 votes. That was Mitch McConnell’s “nuclear option” with Supreme Court nominees. And there are special rules for spending bills, I think. The interesting bit is that the Senate can just change its rules to make cloture easier or harder. Or anything really. Those rules are not in the Constitution. They are just a list that every new session of the Senate votes to adopt as one of their very first activities.
My understanding in the US Senate is that they don’t have to stand up and speak non-stop like Jimmy Stewart did in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. They can just declare a filibuster and with 41 votes they can prevent a bill from getting a vote on the floor.
The rules can be fairly complex. It doesn’t apply to every type of bill.
The only thing that you’re missing is that the modern Senate effectively changed the rules so that a bill won’t go to vote without the 60 cloture votes and the “speaking filibuster” is no longer required.
As others have noted, this is a Senate rule that both Rs and Ds have kept when they have the majority against much frustration from their base, despite the fact that it would be a simple rules vote at the beginning of a term. The general theory is that it’s protective of Senators to minimize tough votes: (1) when they’re in the minority, they won’t get steamrolled by the other side, and (2) when they’re in the majority they won’t be forced to vote for or against their party’s controversial legislation. For example, a centrist Democrat like Joe Manchin would prefer that something like Medicare for all or a fracking ban never comes to the floor so that he doesn’t have to vote against the party. It’s primarily (2) that keeps it in place.
The current exceptions are Supreme Court nominations (the “nuclear option”) and the annual budget reconciliation bill. Many things get jammed into the reconciliation bill as a result.
The way the filibuster would traditionally work is that someone would indeed have to stand up and talk for the entire time. The hope would be to “run out the clock” on an issue by delaying it so long that the congressional session expires or some other time-sensitive piece passes. Or, alternately, bore everyone to the point where they agree to try something else rather than try to outlast the filibuster-ers.
The way the modern US Senate uses the filibuster diverges from this a bit. Basically, the Senate rules have been set up to handwave most of the process. Basically, the parties agree that one party has the ability to filibuster indefinitely if they want to, so the minority party only has to indicate their willingness to filibuster and it will be treated as though it is a full-on filibuster. The majority party can, with 61 votes, invoke “cloture” and force a vote on the bill, but if they lack those votes, they accept that they will never get to a vote on that particular bill and just move on to the next piece of business. This preserves the power of the filibuster, which is intended to be used in an emergency to prevent “the tyranny of the majority”, without completely grinding all business to a halt. Because some bills and votes are not subject to these filibuster rules, so this agreement makes it so that work can still be completed even if the filibustered bills never will be.
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