In today’s Senate, opponents of a bill don’t have to filibuster to delay action and try to beat it by talking. Bluster serves the purpose. They only need to threaten to try to block the measure with marathon debate.
That’s why filibuster tactics, once rare, have become so regular that the crucial number in getting anything enacted is not a 51-vote Senate majority. It is 60, the votes it takes to end debate and force action.
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Long delays are the rule, not the exception. So are the kind of deals Sen. Harry Reid, the majority leader, made to line up the votes he needed to get the health care overhaul passed. He said the deal making was no more than the legislative process at work, calling it compromise and suggesting that most senators probably had some provision tucked into the measure to serve state interests back home.
Republicans said it was legislative bribery, although they used to make their own deals when they controlled Congress.
Whatever it is called, the whole exhibition can only add to voter cynicism about government in general and Congress in particular. And there are more deals coming as negotiators for the House and Senate try to combine their differing bills into one for the final passage that would send it to President Obama.
Though the Senate always has been open to filibusters — the first was in 1837 — they almost never happened until the 20th century, and then they were rare. To undertake one, outnumbered senators trying to wield minority power had to be dead serious and fully committed to blocking majority action, prepared to keep talking day and night to prevent something from being done.
It was, and is, a negative power — not to achieve things but to stop them. Until 1964, Southern senators, most of them Democrats in that era, used the filibuster in their rearguard struggle against civil rights laws. In those days, it took 67 votes, a two-thirds vote of the Senate, to invoke the procedure called cloture and end a filibuster.
Then Senate leaders began changing the system so that a filibuster against one measure didn’t prevent action on other legislation. That took minority consent, but with it, the Senate could go about its business on one track while stalled by a filibuster on another.
It still added up to a sort of parliamentary filibuster, in which the minority can snarl things but everybody gets to sleep at night.
In 1975, the rules were changed to make it easier to end filibusters, with 60 votes instead of 67.
Enter the rule of unintended consequences. Making it easier to stop filibusters also made it easier to conduct them, or threaten to. One Republican or another has done it more than 100 times this year. Democratic leaders have filed 67 cloture motions, and there have been 39 votes to end debate, 35 successful.
Democrats know the system; they used it themselves when they were outnumbered. But Republicans have made more of it since they lost control in 2007.
