A filibuster is a political procedure where one or more members of a Congress or Parliament debate over a proposed piece of legislation so as to delay or entirely prevent a decision being made on the proposal. It is sometimes referred to as "talking a bill to death" or "talking out a bill" and is characterized as a form of obstruction in a legislature or other decision-making body.
Key points
Joe Manchin is a prominent opponent of abolishing the filibuster.
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Background
A filibuster is a political procedure where one or more members of a Congress or Parliament debate over a proposed piece of legislation so as to delay or entirely prevent a decision being made on the proposal. It is sometimes referred to as "talking a bill to death" or "talking out a bill" and is characterized as a form of obstruction in a legislature or other decision-making body. This form of political obstruction reaches as far back as Ancient Roman times and is synonymous with political stonewalling.
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Canada
Federal
A dramatic example of filibustering in the House of Commons of Canada took place between Thursday June 23, 2011 and Saturday 2011-06-25. In an attempt to prevent the passing of Bill C-6, which would have legislated the imposing of a four-year contract and pay conditions on the locked out Canada Post workers, the New Democratic Party (NDP) led a filibustering session which lasted for fifty-eight hours. The NDP argued that the legislation in its then form undermined collective bargaining. Specifically, the NDP opposed the salary provisions and the form of binding arbitration outlined in the bill.
The House was supposed to break for the summer Thursday 2011-06-23, but remained open in an extended session due to the filibuster. The 103 NDP MPs had been taking it in turn to deliver 20 minute speeches - plus 10 minutes of questions and comments - in order to delay the passing of the bill. MPs are allowed to give such speeches each time a vote takes place, and many votes were needed before the bill could be passed. As the Conservative Party of Canada [Conservative Party of Canada] held a majority in the House, the bill passed. This was the longest filibuster since the 1999 Reform Party of Canada filibuster, on native treaty issues in British Columbia.
Another example of filibuster in Canada federally came in early 2014 when NDP MP and Deputy Leader David Christopherson filibustered the government's bill C-23, the Fair Elections Act at the Procedure and House Affairs Committee. His filibuster lasted several meetings, in the last of which he spoke for over 8 hours. It was done to support his own motion to hold cross-country hearings on the bill so that MPs could hear what the Canadian public thought of the bill. In the end, given that the Conservative government had a majority at committee, his motion was defeated and the bill passed although with some significant amendments.
Provincial
The Legislature of the Province of Ontario has witnessed several significant filibusters, although two are notable for the unusual manner by which they were undertaken. The first was an effort on May 6, 1991, by Mike Harris, later premier but then leader of the opposition Progressive Conservatives, to derail the implementation of the budget tabled by the NDP government under premier Bob Rae. The tactic involved the introduction of Bill 95, the title of which contained the names of every lake, river and stream in the province. Between the reading of the title by the proposing MPP, and the subsequent obligatory reading of the title by the clerk of the chamber, this filibuster occupied the entirety of the day's session until adjournment. To prevent this particular tactic to be used again, changes were eventually made to the Standing Orders to limit the time allocated each day to the introduction of bills to 30 minutes.
A second high-profile and uniquely implemented filibuster in the Ontario Legislature occurred in April, 1997, where the Ontario New Democratic Party, then in opposition, tried to prevent the governing Progressive Conservatives'Bill 103 from taking effect. To protest the Tory government's legislation that would amalgamate the municipalities of Metro Toronto into the "megacity" of Toronto, the small NDP caucus introduced 11,500 amendments to the megacity bill, created on computers with mail merge functionality. Each amendment would name a street in the proposed city, and provide that public hearings be held into the megacity with residents of the street invited to participate. The Ontario Liberal Party also joined the filibuster with a smaller series of amendments; a typical Liberal amendment would give a historical designation to a named street. The NDP then added another series of over 700 amendments, each proposing a different date for the bill to come into force.
The filibuster began on April 2 with the Abbeywood Trail amendment and occupied the legislature day and night, the members alternating in shifts. On April 4, exhausted and often sleepy government members inadvertently let one of the NDP amendments pass, and the handful of residents of Cafon Court in Etobicoke were granted the right to a public consultation on the bill, although the government subsequently nullified this with an amendment of its own. On April 6, with the alphabetical list of streets barely into the Es, SpeakerChris Stockwell ruled that there was no need for the 220 words identical in each amendment to be read aloud each time, only the street name. With a vote still needed on each amendment, Zorra Street was not reached until April 8. The Liberal amendments were then voted down one by one, eventually using a similar abbreviated process, and the filibuster finally ended on April 11.
An ironic example of filibustering occurred when the Liberal Party of Newfoundland and Labrador reportedly had "nothing else to do in the House of Assembly" and debated between only themselves about their own budget after both the Conservative and NDP party indicated either their support for the bill or intent to vote.
United States
Senate
The filibuster is a powerful legislative device in the United States Senate. Senate rules permit a senator or senators to speak for as long as they wish and on any topic they choose, unless "three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn" (usually 60 out of 100 senators) bring debate to a close by invoking cloture under Senate Rule XXII. Even if a filibuster attempt is unsuccessful, the process takes floor time. Defenders call the filibuster "The Soul of the Senate."
It is not part of the US Constitution, becoming theoretically possible with a change of Senate rules only in 1806 and not used until 1837. Rarely used for much of the Senate's first two centuries, it was strengthened in the 1970s and in recent years, the majority has preferred to avoid filibusters by moving to other business when a filibuster is threatened and attempts to achieve cloture have failed. As a result, in recent decades this has come to mean that all major legislation (apart from budgets) now requires a 60% majority to pass.
Under current Senate rules, any modification or limitation of the filibuster would be a rule change that itself could be filibustered, with two-thirds of those senators present and voting (as opposed to the normal three-fifths of those sworn) needing to vote to break the filibuster. However, under Senate precedents, a simple majority can (and has) acted to limit the practice by overruling decisions of the chair. The removal or substantial limitation of the filibuster by a simple majority, rather than a rule change, is called the constitutional option by proponents, and the nuclear option by opponents.
On November 21, 2013, the Democratic controlled Senate voted 52 to 48 to require only a majority vote to end a filibuster of all executive and judicial nominees, excluding Supreme Court nominees, rather than the 3/5 of votes previously required. On April 6, 2017, the Republican controlled Senate voted 52 to 48 to require only a majority vote to end a filibuster of Supreme Court nominees. A 3/5 supermajority is still required to end filibusters on legislation.
One of McConnell's most common tactic, as U.S. Senate Minority Leader, to delay or obstruct legislation and judicial appointments has been the filibuster. A filibuster is an attempt to "talk a bill to death," forcing Senate leadership to abandon a proposed measure instead of waiting out the filibuster - or at least to delay the measure's passage. In the United States Senate, any senator may speak for unlimited duration unless a 60-person majority votes to invoke cloture, or end debate, and proceed to a final vote. Political scientists have referred to McConnell's use of the filibuster as "constitutional hardball," referring to the misuse of procedural tools in a way that undermines democracy.
Political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson describe the rationale behind McConnell's filibusters.
"Filibusters left no fingerprints. When voters heard that legislation had been 'defeated', journalists rarely highlighted that this defeat meant a minority had blocked a majority. Not only did this strategy produce an atmosphere of gridlock and dysfunction; it also chewed up the Senate calendar, restricting the range of issues on which Democrats could progress."
In the United States House of Representatives, the filibuster (the right to unlimited debate) was used until 1842, when a permanent rule limiting the duration of debate was created. The disappearing quorum was a tactic used by the minority until SpeakerThomas Brackett Reed eliminated it in 1890. As the membership of the House grew much larger than the Senate, the House had acted earlier to control floor debate and the delay and blocking of floor votes. Through the night of November 18, 2021 into the morning of November 19, 2021, Kevin McCarthy set a record for the longest speech on the House floor (8 hours and 33 minutes), in opposition to the Build Back Better Act.
None of these bills have passed the U.S. Congress, likely because they were either blocked by the filibuster's 60-vote threshold, or never came to a vote because of their likelihood of being blocked by the filibuster. Many of these bills - like the For the People Act - have been hailed by voting rights advocates as crucial to bat off Republican attempts to suppress voters. Since 2021, and as of 2022-05, lawmakers in 18 states have passed 34 laws aimed at suppressing voters - many of which disproportionately affect voters of color. Only one of the measures that Common Cause analyzed passed Congress: the Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act, which passed unanimously in the U.S. Senate, and strengthens requirements for Supreme Court of the United States and other federal judges to disclose their financial holdings and stock trades.
"In the end, with high levels of support in the U.S. Congress and an overwhelming outpouring of public support, Congress ran into one of the reasons our democracy needs to be modernized: the filibuster," Common Cause wrote of Democrats' attempt to pass the For the People Act last year (2021). Even if conservativeDemocratic Senators Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) had been on board with the bill, and given it a majority of 51 votes, "the arcane Senate procedure known as the filibuster requiring supermajorities just to debate an issue, prevented the Democrats from passing major democracy reform and voting rightslegislation, or the Republicans from considering negotiating in good faith to get to 60 votes," Common Cause wrote.
Common Cause's report lends evidence to the argument that progressives and some Democrats have been making for years now: the Senate filibuster is an arcane and dangerous procedure that prevents lawmakers from effectively legislating against attacks on democracy, which currently largely come from the political right. Opponents of the filibuster also saythat it is used to block climate action(that is crucial to keeping a livable planet) [anthropogenic climate change | climate change denial], action to stave off white supremacy, moves to workers' rights, advance protections for abortion rights, and more.
In their analysis, Common Cause also tracked votes for various pro-democracy measures for each individual member of Congress. Of the 535 voting members of Congress, only 101 members earned a perfect score, voting for each measure. All 101 of those members were Democrats or progressives.
[RewireNewsGroup.com, 2022-01-14] How Killing the Filibuster Is a Reproductive Justice Issue. The people most affected by reproductive tyranny are the same people who are systematically being disenfranchised - particularly when it comes to voting.
Our democracy hangs in the balance. Christian evangelicals and their supporters have never had this much power - and they know it. They've got numbers on the Supreme Court of the United States. They've got numbers on the federal courts of appeals. They have also amassed the power to force everyone in this country to bend to their dominionist will. And they're not going to stop with abortion. They're going to come for birth control, trans rights, and same-sex marriage. And in the process they will wield "religious freedom" as a cudgel to beat down every person who does not adhere to their worldview.
Fortunately, our democracy - what little remains of it - can be saved. But the only way to do that is for Democrats to find a way to pass voting rights legislation, Joe Manchin [Joe Manchin of West Virginia] and Kyrsten Sinema be damned. And the only way to do that is to kill or reform the filibuster and hope that if Manchin and Sinema can't be persuaded by noogies or headlocks, then perhaps a couple GOP senators could: Susan Collins? (Unlikely.) Lisa Murkowski? (Perhaps!)
With abortion on the verge of being criminalized in half the states in this country, the people most affected by reproductive tyranny are the same people who are systematically being disenfranchised. Black, brown, and Indigenous people are losing their access to the ballot at the same time the constitutional right to an abortion is coming to an end. (Notably, many Black, brown, and Indigenous people have never had easy access to affordable abortion care.)
The filibuster must be reformed or killed if marginalized people are ever going to control their own political fate. The only recourse for many people of reproductive age in this country will be to remove the anti-choice Republicans who are putting bounties on the heads of people who provide - and get! - abortions and to elect pro-choice Democrats who will protect a pregnant person's right to an abortion. But how are they supposed to do that if they are being prevented from voting by Republicans who know that GOP policies do not reflect majority will? Democrats' refusal - or inability - to reform the filibuster and pass voting rights legislation lays bare the failure of our political system. If a majority of people cannot impose their will through their representatives, then what's the point of pretending we live in a democracy?
And it's not just abortion. It's decisions being made at the local level about a wide swath of issues - masks in schools and COVID-19 vaccine mandates, for instance - that affect a person's ability to raise the children they have in a safe environment, one of the key tenets of reproductive justice. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the filibuster is killing us.
The filibuster is anti-democratic
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[JacobinMag.com, 2022-01-13] The Anti-Abortion Movement Is Desperate to Protect the Filibuster. Anti-abortion forces can't win by democratic means, so they are campaigning to protect the filibuster and crush voting rights - and Democrats may be content to let them win.
The nation's most prominent anti-abortion group has been leading the campaign to protect the United States Senate's legislative filibuster, in order to ensure that Democrats don't pass voting rights protections. The right-wingers promoting the filibuster have been fully transparent about their goal: they want to block a federal voting rights law so they can elect more anti-choice politicians and to protect the Supreme Court of the United States' conservativesupermajority that's threatening abortion rights. It's one more piece of evidence that defending the filibuster isn't about preserving a rarefied legislative tradition - it's all about rigging the game to maximize conservatives' power. So far, some Democrats seem content with allowing conservatives to win the argument and are refusing to end the filibuster - while other party lawmakers are considering weaker rule changes that might not do anything to help Democrats actually pass a voting rights bill.
Last year, the Susan B. Anthony List (SBA List) helped launch the Election Transparency Initiative, with the stated goal of blocking Democrats from passing a national voting rights bill that would undo new Republicanvoter suppression laws around the country. Central to that effort: defending the filibuster, the U.S. Senate rule requiring sixty votes to advance most legislation. In a press release announcing the initiative, the SBA List said the effort would include opposing H.R.1 - the strongest voting rights and democracy reform bill that Democrats have considered - and "mounting a vigorous defense of the filibuster and current U.S. Senate rules governing the reconciliation process, so as to prevent the worst of the pro-abortionDemocrat agenda: unilaterally passing H.R.1. [For the People Act, introduced as H.R. 1, is a bill in the United States Congress to expand voting rights, change campaign finance laws to reduce the influence of money in politics, ban partisan gerrymandering, and create new ethics rules for federal officeholders. | H.R.1 - For the People Act of 2021] and expanding the U.S. Supreme Court." According to Pew Research Center survey data from last year, roughly six in ten Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
In recent months, the Election Transparency Initiative has been running ads pressuring corporate senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona - the two Democrats who have publicly opposed filibuster reforms - not to allow any changes to the filibuster. "For a century the filibuster has been a bedrock U.S. Senate tool ensuring bipartisanship," says one video ad from the Election Transparency Initiative. "Ending it means more dysfunction. Thankfully, Senator Joe Manchin pledged to protect the filibuster, despite partisan pressure to cave. If Manchin sides with liberal elites to weaken the filibuster with carve-outs for Democrats' priorities, he would violate the trust of voters. Tell Manchin: Keep your promise. Protect the filibuster." A similar version has aired recently on West Virginia radio stations.
An Arizona ad from Election Transparency Initiative says:
Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the Democratic Party's rotating villains of choice for the Joe Biden era, have both publicly resisted calls to end the filibuster, arguing that U.S. SenateDemocrats and Republicans should learn to work together instead - a fantasy that plays into the hands of groups like the Susan B. Anthony List (SBA List) that want to eliminate abortion access and restrict voting rights as well as corporate lobbyists who want to prevent Democrats from passing any bills that could threaten their clients' profits.
With the GOPblocking voting rights legislation all of last year [2021], Democrats are now once again considering a number of potential filibuster reform options, with President Joe Biden imploring them on Tuesday [2022-01-11] to change the rules "whichever way they need to be changed to prevent a minority of senators from blocking action on voting rights." It's not clear yet whether Democrats can win over Kyrsten Sinema or Joe Manchin, even though the West Virginia senatorbacked filibuster reforms a decade ago. And some of the more limited filibuster reform ideas Democrats are discussing might not even functionally end the GOP's legislative blockade and help to pass a voting rights bill - a reminder that Democratic lawmakers are much more comfortable failing the public than the donor class and are fine with Republicans setting policy.
"A Vigorous Defense of the Filibuster"
The SBA List last year helped create the Election Transparency Initiative, helmed by Ken Cuccinelli, a former Virginia attorney general and abortion rights opponent who served as an immigration official in the Donald Trump administration. While the Election Transparency Initiative was announced as a joint effort between the SBA List and another conservative group, the American Principles Project, state incorporation records show the SBA List is acting as the group's fiscal sponsor, registering the Election Transparency Initiative as a fictitious name in Virginia.
Ad buy [a campaign messaging strategy that targets potential voters via paid media advertisements] filings with the Federal Communications CommissionnameSBA List officials - president Marjorie Dannenfelser and chairman Jane Abraham [local copy] - as the leaders of the Election Transparency Initiative. The SBA List has been extremely open about why it created the Election Transparency Initiative and why the SBA List is opposing efforts to reform or eliminate the filibuster: the SBA List wants to block federal voting rights legislation in order to protect new restrictive state voting laws, with the point being that it will be easier to elect more anti-abortion lawmakers. The SBA List also wants to make sure Democrats don't try to add seats to the U.S. Supreme Court, whose six-three conservative supermajority could soon overturn the court's landmark 1973 abortion decision, Roe v. Wade.
Keeping the filibuster in place so that bills can't pass by a simple majority vote would also make it impossible for Democrats to pass existing legislation to codify Roe v. Wade as a federal law - something President Barack Obama had pledged to do in his first act as president. The Women's Health Protection Act of 2021 legislation currently has forty-eight Democraticcosponsors, with the only holdouts being Joe Manchin and Pennsylvania senator Bob Casey, Jr..
To be clear, it's not as if the SBA List has any kind of ideological affection for the filibuster or U.S. Senate rules: when Republicans eliminated the filibuster for U.S. Supreme Court nominees in order to confirm Justice Neil Gorsuch, the SBA Listissued a press release praising the move [note: 2017-04-07].
"Today [2017-04-07] the U.S. Senate voted to confirm Judge Neil Gorsuch as the next U.S. Supreme Court Justice," the SBA List wrote. "The vote comes one day after Majority Leader Mitch McConnell moved to change the procedural rules of the U.S. Senate and end the Democrats' filibuster of President Trump's nominee." "The swift fulfillment of President Trump's commitment to appoint pro-life U.S. Supreme Court justices is a tremendous win for the pro-life movements," Marjorie Dannenfelser added in the press release.
While Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema pretend that keeping the filibuster encourages interparty cooperation and call for voting rights legislation to be passed in a bipartisanmanner, anti-abortion activists have already admitted their campaign to protect the filibuster is about ensuring that Democrats cannot pass a voting rights bill at all or try to undo the GOP's U.S. Supreme Court's conservative supermajority.
It's a much more honest approach than what gets said by corporate lobbying groups like the United States Chamber of Commerce, which has also opposed filibuster reform because the rule serves to protect business interests, but has instead insisted that the rule encourages lawmakers "to build consensus and encourage collaboration."
On the floor of the United States Senate on Thursday [2022-01-13] - just hours before President Joe Biden was set to meet with Senate Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema made clear her opposition to changing the Senate rules to pass voting rights legislation, effectively killing the Democratslast, best chance to protect American democracy. "There's no need for me to restate my longstanding support for the 60-vote threshold to pass legislation," Sinema said. "It is the view I continue to hold."
Kyrsten Sinema is preserving an asymmetry in rules that has allowed Republicans to systematically undermine fair elections over the past year but blocked Democrats from taking any action to stop them. Republican-controlled states, including her home state of Arizona, are passing a wave of new voter suppression laws [Voter suppression in the United States] through simple-majority, party-line votes, but Sinema is maintaining that any effort to protect voting rights in the Senate must have a bipartisan supermajority. Sinema is effectively prioritizing the rights of the GOP minority in the Senate over the protection of minority voters. "Effort to fix these problems on bare majorities on a party-line basis only exacerbate the root causes that gave way to these state laws in the first place," Sinema said, ignoring how landmark efforts to protect voting rights, such as the 15th Amendment [Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution], were passed on party-line votes.
President Joe Biden plans to renew his push for congressional action to protect voting rights in a speech in Georgia on Tuesday [2022-01-11] as Democratic Party's proposed federal legislation has stalled and the president faces growing pressure to intervene. Biden is expected to throw his support behind changing the filibuster to make it easier to pass voting rights bills and to ensure that "it can be restored and this basic right is defended," according to a White House official, who provided a preview of Biden's remarks on the condition of anonymity.
