Americans used to expect Congress to find enough bipartisan agreement to solve the nation’s problems, big or small. Abuse of filibusters in the U.S. Senate in recent years, mainly by Republicans, has trashed that prospect. Now, it commonly takes a super-majority of 60 votes in the Senate to pass any meaningful legislation – a circumstance that essentially allows the Senate’s minority party to paralyze the Senate and thwart progress of any sort.
Consequently, very few bills get enacted into law. Stalemate rules.
Observers once would have described filibusters the old-fashioned way. When bills proposing laws of various sorts got to the Senate floor for debate, opponents were allowed to rise and speak against the bill as long as they could stand and talk. When all the senators had had their say – however long it took – a vote was taken and a simple majority won.
The 1939 movie, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” pretty much captured the historical essence of days-long filibusters. Opponents could talk a bill to death, or persuade their colleagues to make enough bipartisan changes to satisfy the opposition.
That hasn’t happened in years. Now, and especially in the last decade, it takes merely the threat of a filibuster to stall progress of a bill at almost any stage of the legislative process, from committees to a vote even to bring a bill to the floor for debate. The latter has become the common rule. Worse, instigators of a filibuster to defeat a bill don’t even have to identify themselves. Rather, they can anonymously place a “hold” on a bill – an implied threat of a filibuster relayed to the Senate’s majority leader by a minority leader.