Senate Filibuster, Short History

Proving the 67 vote rule was much better. But because Democrats changed it, I guess it’s OK, right? How did we get to such a low threshold to choke off debate? How did we get ready for bend over grab the ankles?

In the beginning -- The early years of Congress, representatives as well as senators could filibuster. As the House of Representatives grew in numbers, however, revisions to the House rules limited debate. In the smaller Senate, unlimited debate continued on the grounds that any senator should have the right to speak as long as necessary on any issue.

In 1841, when the Democratic minority hoped to block a bank bill promoted by Kentucky Senator Henry Clay, he threatened to change Senate rules to allow the majority to close debate. Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton rebuked Clay for trying to stifle the Senate's right to unlimited debate.

Three quarters of a century later, in 1917, senators adopted a rule (Rule 22), at the urging President Woodrow Wilson(D), that allowed the Senate to end a debate with a two-thirds(67) majority vote, a device known as "cloture."

Filibusters were particularly useful to Southern senators who sought to block civil rights legislation, including anti-lynching legislation, until cloture was invoked after a fifty-seven day filibuster against the Civil Right Act of 1964. In 1975, the Senate reduced the number of votes required for cloture from two-thirds to three-fifths, or sixty of the current one hundred senators.

So then it became far more advantageous to allow a lower threshold and so the ruthless Democrats lowered the bar ...

The liberal Democrat Senate majority, determined not to be blocked by endless argument over legislation in a period of economic crisis, last week approved a compromise that achieved the first new limitation on debate since 1959. A filibuster will be choked off if 60 Senators (three-fifths of the total membership) vote to do so. That is seven less than the number (two-thirds) that had been required under the Senate’s celebrated Rule 22, assuming the entire Senate was present and voting.

When you look at our guys you find milquetoast ... Why didn’t they change the rule back when they were in charge. Yeah, why?

References here and here.