Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Filibusters

Starting point is 00:00:00 In the United States Senate, there's a procedural rule which is very uncommon amongst legislative bodies. According to the Senate's rules, senators may speak for as long as they wish on any subject until three-fifths of the members of the body vote to end debate. While this may seem like a rather innocuous rule, the implications of it have been wide-ranging. Learn more about the filibuster, how it came to be, and how it's been used on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? Throughline is a a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night.

Starting point is 00:00:52 And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the Thuline podcast from NPR. Fillebustering actually has a long history. And the version that's practiced in the U.S. Senate is not the only kind. The English word filibuster actually comes from the Spanish word filibuster, which basically means freebooter, which was a type of pirate. The Spanish word may have itself come from the Dutch word, Vrybiter, which basically means the same thing. This word became used to describe someone who obstructs legislation in the 19th century. A filibuster is, generally speaking, an attempt to block

Starting point is 00:01:33 a vote using procedural means. In the late Roman Republic, the Roman Senate had a rule that all debate and discussion had to end at dusk. Cato the Younger would often take advantage of this by speaking all day until sunset, ensuring that a vote on something couldn't take place. Likewise, legislators have used parliamentary tactics in countries all over the world to try and delay legislation. The Canadian Parliament has seen filibusters where one party will try to extend discussions on the floor of Parliament. In June 2011, for example, members of the New Democratic Party spent 58 hours taking turns speaking and asking questions to delay a vote on a bill about postal worker wages. Likewise, in Ontario in 1997, the New Democratic Party submitted a lot of

Starting point is 00:02:15 11,500 amendments to a bill that would have expanded the size of the city of Toronto. In 2011, Labor Party members in the House of Lords and the UK had a go-slow campaign to delay the implementation of a law that would have put a referendum on the ballot, but it had to be passed by a specific date for it to get on the ballot. They managed to keep the debate going for 17 days. There are many other cases of individual lawmakers using marathon speeches to delay votes. In 1963, Roseller Lim gave an 18-hour speech in the Philippine Senate to wait for one of his colleagues to arrive who was on a flight from the United States. He literally had to stand in place the entire time and relieved himself right where he was standing. In 2010, Werner Kogler of the

Starting point is 00:02:58 Austrian Green Party spoke for 12 hours and 42 minutes on a bill. While these legislative attempts at delaying votes have taken place all over the world, none of them can quite compare to the United States Senate, where filibusters, or at least the threat of filibusters, are constantly hanging over every piece of legislation. There is nothing in the United States Constitution about filibusters. The only thing that is relevant is under Article 1, Section 5, which simply says, quote, each house may determine the rules of its proceedings. So the rules which allow for filibusters are created by the Senate and can be changed by the Senate. But the rules that allow for Villabusters were never intended with that outcome in mind.

Starting point is 00:03:40 When the first Congress met in March of 1789, there were no rules about the length of speeches or ending debate on a subject. Almost immediately, this caused a problem. In September 1789, Senator William McLeh of Pennsylvania wrote in his diary about a piece of legislation which was to establish Philadelphia as the nation's capital. He noted that the quote, design of the Virginians was to talk away the time so that we could not get the bill passed. So the Senate passed a rule that allowed for calling the previous question, aka ending debate.

Starting point is 00:04:12 However, a motion to call the previous question could itself be debated, so it couldn't really guarantee an end to the debate. In early 1805, the vice president of the United States was Aaron Burr. Yeah, that Aaron Burr that killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. The vice president is constitutionally the president of the Senate. while today the vice president only tends to show up to break tie votes, back then the vice president was usually in the Senate chamber all the time leading the proceedings. The Senate in 1805 was also very small, with only 34 members. Burr believed that because the Senate was small and was supposed to be collegial,

Starting point is 00:04:50 they didn't need so many procedural rules. So in 1806, the Senate dropped the rule which allowed for the calling of the previous question. This seemed innocent enough, but the senators who passed this rule, didn't think through the implications. Nothing much happened until 1837. A group of senators from the Whig Party conducted a filibuster to block attempts by the Democrats

Starting point is 00:05:12 to remove a censure that was placed on President Andrew Jackson. In 1841, the Democrats ran a filibuster against the Whigs during a debate on the charter of a new national bank. During the debate, the Whig Senator from Kentucky, Henry Clay, threatened to change the rules

Starting point is 00:05:27 to limit discussion. And in response, the Democratic Senator from Alabama, William King, threatened an even longer filibuster, and the proposed rule change was dropped. Surprisingly, during and leading up to the Civil War, the most contentious period in the history of the United States Congress, the filibuster was seldom used by either side. The inability to close debate remained a rule in the Senate throughout the 19th century,

Starting point is 00:05:52 and the issue didn't come to a head again until 1917. During the First World War, 12 anti-war senators managed to kill a proposal that would have armed U.S. merchant vessels that were encountering German submarines in the Atlantic. Led by Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollett, the group managed to tie up debate for 26 hours until the session of Congress ended on March 3rd, preventing the bill from being voted on. President Woodrow Wilson was incensed at what happened. He said, quote, The Senate of the United States is the only legislative body in the world which cannot act when its majority is ready for action. A little group of willful men representing no opinion

Starting point is 00:06:30 but their own have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible. End quote. As soon as the new Congress began on March 4th, Wilson encouraged the Senate to pass a rule allowing cloture. Cloture is just the ability to close debate to bring a bill to a vote. This became one of the top priorities of the new Senate in the first days of the new session. Unfortunately, the rule to allow for cloture was itself subject to debate, so intense negotiations had to take place.

Starting point is 00:07:00 The compromise was known as Rule 22. To summarize Rule 22, because it would be way too long and boring to read, it required 16 senators to bring forward cloture on a bill. It then took two-thirds of the sitting senators to vote in favor of cloture. If a vote on cloture passes, then there is an additional 30 hours where debate can take place, and after that, a vote on a bill will promptly proceed. The requirement of a supermajority instead of a simple majority was the compromise. I should note that cloture doesn't have to be invoked on every single bill.

Starting point is 00:07:34 In fact, there have been many entire Congresses where there were no motions to invoke cloture at all. The first two attempts to invoke cloture took place during the 65th Congress in 1917 and 1918, and both attempts failed. Ironically enough, the first time a cloture motion was successful was in 1919, and it was on the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, which was promoted by Woodrow Wilson. However, in the subsequent vote, the treaty failed to be ratified, primarily because of stipulations in the treaty that allowed the League of Nations to declare war without the consent of Congress. Rule 22 was seldom invoked over the next 40 years. That wasn't to say there weren't filibusters that occurred, however. Several senators used filibusters just to bring attention to issues or to themselves. In the 1930s, Senator Huey Long from Louisiana would often have personal filibusters to delay any bills that he thought favored the rich over the poor. In the 1950s, Oregon Senator Wayne Morse would often filibuster bills that he wanted to bring attention to,

Starting point is 00:08:30 as he knew his filibuster would get media coverage. In 1953, for example, he set a then record of speaking for 22 hours and 26 minutes on oil drilling legislation. I should note that at the time, these filibusters shut down all activity in the Senate. Nothing could move forward so long as someone kept debate open on a bill. Very serious and long filibusters began taking place when civil rights legislation began being proposed in the 1950s and the 1960s. Southern Democrats were adamant about stopping civil rights legislation and went to extreme measures to block such legislation from even coming to a vote. In 1946, a group of five Southern Democratic senators blocked legislation on the Fair Employment Practice Committee that was intended to stop workplace discrimination. In 1957, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurman set the philadelphia.

Starting point is 00:09:20 record, which still stands today, when he spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the 1957 civil rights bill. He read voting laws from all 48 states, Washington's farewell address, and various Supreme Court rulings, and even from the book Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. His entire speech took up 96 pages in the congressional record and cost over $7,000 in printing costs, which would be over $73,000 today. All of his efforts were for not because two hours after his filibuster ended, the bill was passed by the Senate. The 1964 Civil Rights Act also saw an organized attempt by Southern Democrats to block the bill, which otherwise had a clear bipartisan majority in support of it.

Starting point is 00:10:04 The Southern Democrats managed to hold up the bill for 60 days, including a 14-hour and 13-minute speech by Senator Robert Bird of West Virginia. It ended with only the second successful cloture vote since 1927 when 71 senators voted to end debate. These attempts to derail civil rights legislation led to calls to change the culture rules in the Senate. And there were two major changes which took place in the 1970s. In 1972, both the Republican and Democratic leaders in the Senate pushed through a rules change which allowed for a two-track system of legislation. Previously, when a filibuster took place, everything in the Senate stopped. Under the new system, any bill that was being

Starting point is 00:10:46 filibustered could be put aside by unanimous consent, so other than legislation could be voted on. While this was good insofar as a filibuster didn't mean stopping all activity in the Senate, it also made filibustering much easier. There wasn't as much pain inflicted on the rest of the Senate as everything could just flow around whatever was being blocked. And a senator didn't have to physically stand on the floor of the Senate to block legislation. The other major change took place in 1975, when the number of votes required for cloture was reduced from two-thirds to three-fifths. Instead of 67 senators, you now only needed 60. However, the number of votes required to end debate on a rules change remained at two-thirds. These two changes resulted in an explosion of filibusters,

Starting point is 00:11:32 as well as an increase in cloture votes. The 92nd Congress, which sat in 1971 and 1972, saw 20 motions for cloture, almost tripling the previous record, with four successful votes for cloture. Previously, there had never been a Congress that had more than one. From there, the numbers kept climbing dramatically. In the most recently completed Congress, the 117th, which sat in 2021 and 2022, there were 336 motions for cloture, with 289 votes taking place and 270 of the votes being successful. The success rate of cloture votes was 93%, a figure that most people probably don't realize is that high.

Starting point is 00:12:13 There is a technical way around the cloture rules, which is known as the nuclearized, option. It's done by raising a point of order to a standing rule that can be overridden with a simple majority. This was done by the Democrats in 2013 to allow a simple majority to approve cloture on non-Supreme court presidential nominations, and the Republicans also did this in kind in 2017, extending it to Supreme Court nominations. It's thought that something similar could be done to end the three-fifths cloture rule generally, but so far, as of the time of this recording, nothing has been done. The filibuster remains a controversial thing, and every few years the subject pops up about changing the rules to get rid of it. The filibuster is probably the single biggest issue for which politicians of both parties have changed sides the most.

Starting point is 00:13:00 You can find an ample number of quotes from both Republicans and Democrats who have both defended and attacked the filibuster over time. And shockingly, almost every time a senator defends the filibuster, it's when their party is in the minority. and every time they attack the filibuster happens to be when their party is in the majority. There have been several times since 1806 when one party has had a supermajority control of the Senate. At some point, the majority party could have changed the Senate rules to make it easy to close debate and end the filibuster as we know it. Likewise, some party could use the nuclear option to eliminate the filibuster, but nobody has. The reason probably has to do with the fact that the balance of power in the Senate is always close. and that balance can easily change in the next election.

Starting point is 00:13:48 Whatever temporary gain can be had by the majority party by getting rid of the filibuster could easily come back to haunt them in the next election. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listener Max, who sent me an email. He writes, Hello, my name is Max and I'm 12 years old. I love Everything Everywhere Daily, and it's my favorite podcast.

Starting point is 00:14:16 I started listening in March and just, join the Completionist Club in San Mateo near San Francisco. I'd be really happy if you read this on the show. I don't know how to leave a review on Apple Podcast, so I'm just sending this email. My favorite episode was the one about the greatest blowouts in sports, and I hope to hear an episode about Star Wars or volleyball. Thank you for your time. Well, thanks, Max.

Starting point is 00:14:36 I've been to San Mateo several times on my trips to the Bay Area, and I'm very familiar with the city. You also might very well be the youngest member of the Completionist Club, at least the youngest member that I'm aware of. And as for Star Wars and volleyball, well, you'll just have to stay tuned for future episodes. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boost to gram, you two can have it right on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Filibusters

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