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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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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