Filibuster

So You Wanna Reform The Filibuster? Here's How

Ben Frumin | February 22, 2010, 11:20AM

Strom Thurmond sets the filibuster record: 24 hours, 18 minutes.

Here's the good news: reforming the filibuster -- technically speaking -- isn't that hard.

The bad news: It's unlikely Democrats have the political will to do it.

Threatened use of the parliamentary delaying procedure -- which requires 60 votes to overcome -- has become increasingly common since Republicans returned to the minority. And there's been quite a bit of talk of reforming it. Sen. Evan Bayh's (D-IN) for it. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) reportedly is too. Cal Cunningham, a candidate for the Democratic nomination for Senate in North Carolina, is making filibuster reform a campaign issue. And a majority of Americans want the filibuster gone.

So what can be done about it?

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Cloture

The Rise Of Cloture: How GOP Filibuster Threats Have Changed The Senate

Ben Frumin and Jason Reif | January 27, 2010, 12:51PM

While Republicans spent the last several months threatening to filibuster the Democrats' health care reform bill in the Senate, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid scrambled to secure 60 votes -- only to have the whole fragile arrangement blow up when Republican Scott Brown won the Massachusetts senate election last week -- we kept hearing that the relatively recent rise in filibuster threats was a bipartisan phenomenon. Both parties are guilty of this when they're in the minority, we heard.

It's true that there has been a decades-long uptick in the use of cloture filings -- often to overcome filibuster threats -- by whichever party is in the majority, but the best measurement of that trend shows an explosion since Republicans were consigned to minority status after the 2006 election.

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