Derived from a Dutch word meaning "pirate" or "freebooter", the filibuster has been used as a tactic in the United States Congress for nearly two centuries.
The first time that the filibuster was used in the United States Senate was in 1837, when several Jacksonian Senators sought to expunge the Senate's formal censure of President Andrew Jackson in 1834 for withdrawing federal deposits from the Bank of the United States. The Anti-Jacksonian Senators used the filibuster as a procedural tactic to delay the motion. Ultimately, the filibuster failed and the pro-Jackson contingent succeeded in expunging the President's censure from the Senate record.
In 1841, Kentucky Senator Henry Clay promoted a bill to charter the Second Bank of the United States. When Senator William R. King threatened to filibuster the bill, Clay raised the spectre of ending the filibuster by changing the Senate rules to allow a simple majority to end debate. Following a stiff rebuke by Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Senator Clay backed off his threat.
Actually, the House of Representatives used to have the filibuster as a procedural tactic as well. But as the House of Representatives grew larger and larger, it became unrealistic to allow the tactic to survive and eventually the House revised its rules to limit debate.
In 1917, the Democratic Senate adopted the now-famous cloture rule, which is a motion to end debate on a bill and allow the entire chamber to give the bill an up or down vote. At this point in time, two thirds of those voting in the Senate needed to vote "Aye" in order to close debate.
In 1946, Southern Senators (known as "Dixiecrats"), successfully blocked a cloture motion to end debate on a bill proposed by Democrat Dennis Chavez of New Mexico. The bill would have established the Fair Employment Practices Committee to prevent discrimination in the workplace. The Southerners' filibuster lasted weeks and the bill was eventually withdrawn.
The record for the longest individual speech in the history of the filibuster is held by J. Strom Thurmond (Dixiecrat, later Republican), who spoke for 24 hours, 18 minutes in an attempt to block the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The filibuster ultimately failed and the bill was signed into law.
As I am sure most of you are aware, some of the most prominent filibustering in this nation's history occured in the 1960's. Once again, Southern Senators sought to block civil rights legislation. In response, then Majority Whip Robert Byrd (WV), devised a tracking system which would allow the majority leader to have more than one bill pending at a time. Previous to this rule, a filibuster could stop the Senate from moving to any other business.
On Sept. 25, 1968, Republicans in the Senate, joined by Dixiecrats, undertook an unprecedented filibustering of President Lyndon Johnson's nominee for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Abe Fortas.
In 1975, the Senate moved the goalposts so that only 3/5ths (60 members) of the Senate needed to vote Aye on the cloture motion to defeat a filibuster.
Although the filibuster has a storied past, the reality of the situation is that the filibustering of bills used to be incredibly rare. Even in the 1960's no Senate term had more than 7 filibusters. Since that time, the use of the filibuster has gone up rather steadily, culminating in a record 112 filibusters by the Republicans during the 110th Congress.
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Currently, there are two mechanisms the Senate has at its disposal to circumvent the filibuster. First, there is the Budget Reconciliation measure, which simply places an aspect of a bill in the budget itself, which receives an up or down vote on the Senate Floor. The Budget Reconciliation measure used to be only for bills which would reduce the deficit, but thanks to the 1996 Republican Senate, it now pertains to all matters related to budget issues.
The second way in which the Senate can bypass the filibuster is to place the debated bill on the agenda indefinitely. Quite frankly, before I had done research on the topic of the filibuster, I had never heard of this method of going around the filibuster. Therefore, I believe that I can offer no better explanation of it than to directly quote the source where I found it (wikipedia):
A filibuster can be defeated by the governing party if they leave the debated issue on the agenda indefinitely, without adding anything else. Indeed, Strom Thurmond's own attempt to filibuster the Civil Rights Act was defeated when Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield refused to refer any further business to the Senate, which required the filibuster to be kept up indefinitely. Instead, the opponents were all given a chance to speak, and the matter eventually was forced to a vote.
I do not know why this method hasn't been used more frequently, but I imagine it has to do with political fallout from the minority.
Interestingly, there was an attempt as recently as 2005 to sweep away the 60-vote requirement in order to end a filibuster by a simple majority vote. Dubbed the "nuclear option," Republican Senators (who were in the majority at the time) planned to eliminate the filibuster permanently in response to Democratic filibusters of three of Bush's most conservative judicial appointees: Janice Rogers Brown, Priscilla Owen, and William Pryor. What ultimately happened is that the Democrats agreed not to filibuster these judicial appointees and they were all confirmed by the Republican Senate.
Links to research:
http://www.hnn.us/...
http://www.senate.gov/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
http://www.experiencefestival.com/...