A Lengthy, Pointless Speech

President Obama has a clear majority in the Senate, but his reforms may still fail because of the opposition’s disruptive filibustering.

After the election loss in Massachusetts, President Obama’s party still has 59 of 100 Senators on his side – obviously a clear majority. But that won’t be enough for the Democrats to transform their ambitious agenda on health care, the environment and the economy into law.

A small item in the Senate procedure manual permits each individual senator to wreak havoc with the daily order of business by giving a speech. There are no rules concerning the length of this speech. With this so-called “filibuster,” any legislation proposed by the government may be blocked indefinitely unless the majority party can pull together a 60-vote super-majority needed to stop the filibuster.

Now, Obama falls one vote short of the needed number, and that places his entire agenda in peril. The notion that a party with a 59 percent majority in the Senate is unable to pass its proposals contradicts the basic principles of democracy.

The result: The minority blackmails the majority more and more now. In 1960, only 8 percent of all legislation was threatened by filibuster; by 1980, that had risen to 27 percent. In practice today, two-thirds of all proposed legislation needs a super-majority for passage, because Republicans threaten to filibuster.

The effort required is minimal. Only rarely does a senator have to stand at the speaker’s dais and talk constantly for 24 hours, as Senator Strom Thurmond did in 1957, in trying to deny black Americans equality under the law. His speech went down as the longest filibuster in U.S. history.

Today, it’s usual practice for the minority to merely announce its intention to filibuster; that’s generally sufficient to cause the majority party to start trying to assemble the 60 votes necessary to stop a filibuster that hasn’t even started yet.

Optimistic observers believe that increased filibuster use has led the two parties toward more cooperation and willingness to compromise. But realists know it leads only to increased polarization. Because of these blockades, the legislative process takes increasingly longer and costs the government more, because it often ends up having to bribe a single senator with money for his or her state.

The fact that a 41 percent minority is allowed to torpedo the goals of the legally elected majority is profoundly undemocratic. America needs to get rid of the filibuster.