By Robert Schlesinger
Posted January 25, 2010
To observe the moribund Democrats and gleeful Republicans last week in the wake of Scott Brown's Massachusetts miracle, one would think that the number of Democrats in the Senate had already dipped to 49, rather than 59. And that's actually not too far off base. As the Village Voice put it: "Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate." Or as a friend quipped, 60 is the new 50.
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That's because of the filibuster, which allows 41 members to prevent a final vote on almost any piece of legislation. Mere majority support is insufficient to pass a bill; you must have a supermajority. Contemporary politics and recollections of famous past filibusters—whether the heroic Jimmy Stewart in 1939's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or the villainous Strom Thurmond in 1957's civil rights debate—would lead one to believe that this was always the case. But that is not so.
In fact, the use of the filibuster has undergone a radical shift, from protecting the party out of power to creating a tyranny of the minority.
According to Barbara Sinclair, a political scientist at UCLA who has tabulated such statistics, there was an average of one filibuster per Congress during the 1950s. These were the Mr. Smith- and Strom-style filibusters of popular imagination: a lone senator or small group tying up the floor, talking endlessly. And they bear little resemblance to the modern filibuster, which is all talk or no talk at all, depending upon how you view it. That's because in 1964, the Senate adopted a two-track method of debating legislation. Instead of the chamber grinding to a halt during a filibuster, other work could go on. And then in 1975, the threshold for breaking a filibuster was lowered from 67 to 60 votes.
Filibusters became both less disruptive and more easily managed, and by the mid-1980s, there were almost 17 per Congress. Filibustering took on a new definition. No longer was it talking a bill to death; it was merely an inability to muster 60 votes to end debate.
Then the practice really took off....
US News & World Report
