The Truth About The Senate Filibuster Rule, 3625

Good afternoon, I’m still reporting on the coup.
The Democrats, with the willing assistance of the mainstream media and the perhaps unwitting assistance of the public education system, are attempting to rewrite the history of the United States Senate.
According to the Democrats, the filibuster in the Senate is a relic of the Jim Crow era and should be abolished. The Democrats fail to acknowledge that it was the Democrats who were responsible for the Jim Crow laws being passed, but that is a different matter.
The first Senate filibuster was in the first session of the Senate in 1789. The freedom of unlimited debate is a core principle of the Senate rules and always has been.
What the Democrats are actually talking about is not the filibuster, but the rules in the Senate to end a filibuster. Up until 1917 there was no rule that allowed the majority, even a two thirds majority of the Senate to end a filibuster.
In order to make it possible for the Senate to act on bills in a more timely manner, the cloture rule was passed which allowed the Senate to end unlimited debate or a filibuster on a matter with a two thirds majority vote. In today’s Senate that would be 67 senators voting in favor of cloture or ending debate.
It is critical to note that the law in 1917 didn’t invent the filibuster which had been in practice for over a century but limited the filibuster in order to move bills through the Senate with less obstruction.
Cloture prevented a small group of like-minded Senators from holding up the Senate with a filibuster or unlimited debate. However, the two thirds rule in the Senate was an extremely high bar and over the next four decades there were only five successful cloture votes.
In 1975 the Senate decided that requiring a two thirds majority to end debate was too high and reduced it to three fifths which is 60 votes.
What the unlimited debate rule in the Senate does is protect the rights of the minority party.
A simple majority in the House can pass any bill it supports as well as silence the minority. In the current House, the Democrats have a majority by only a handful of votes, but that is enough for Speaker Nancy Pelosi to push through bills so radical that only a short time ago, the Democrats never would have considered introducing them.
But there is a reason that the Senate is known as the place House bills go to die. The Senate is and always has been different. Senate rules are confusing because a simple majority can pass a bill, but it takes 60 votes to end debate and get that bill to the floor of the Senate for a vote. It happens that bills pass with less than 60 votes when enough Senators believe that a bill should be debated and voted on even if they don’t support it.

But what the Democrats now want to do is to be able to end debate with a simple majority and the Senate will then become a smaller version of the House where the majority can do whatever it wants and ignore the minority party.
One great thing about the Senate is that in modern times with few exceptions like the first 10 months of the Obama administration the Senate has been fairly evenly divided which means support was needed from both parties to get a bill to the floor for a vote. This accomplishes what the Founders intended, it slows down government. Just because something is wildly popular at a particular moment in time and rushes through the House doesn’t mean that it’s going to become law, because under the current rules 60 Senators have to agree to bring it to the floor for a vote.
Republicans are not entirely opposed to having the Democrats do away with the 60-vote rule to end debate because some Republicans are convinced they will take back the majority in the Senate in 2022 and with a simple majority vote to end debate they can do to the Democrats what the Democrats now want to do to them.
The Democrats in 2013 decided that when considering the approval of a lower-level judicial nominee, debate could be ended by a simple majority vote not the 60 votes that had been required. This allowed President Donald Trump to appoint hundreds of conservative federal judges that never would have gotten approval under the system requiring 60 votes for cloture. The Republicans followed that lead and changed the rule to a simple majority for Supreme Court Justices also which allowed Trump to appoint three conservative Supreme Court Justices.

One might think that the Democrats would have learned from that experience, but the mad obsession for complete power over the government, even if it is short lived has blinded the Democrats to the long-term consequences of their actions.
And it is no surprise that the Democrats are attempting to accomplish this by incorrectly tying the filibuster to Jim Crow laws. If the Democrats really want to discuss Jim Crow laws, perhaps they should talk about who passed those laws (Democrats) and who opposed them (Republicans).
I’m still reporting from just outside the citadel of world freedom. Good day.