Durbin and the Filibuster ‘Myth’
The minority party in the Senate — in this case, the Democrats — can block, or filibuster, legislation by taking advantage of a Senate rule that requires 60 votes to end debate on legislation before a final vote can be taken on the bill. That’s what caused the recent partial government shutdown.
On ABC’s “This Week,” Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin defended the parliamentary practice, claiming getting rid of the filibuster “would be the end of the Senate as it was originally devised and created going back to our Founding Fathers.” But the filibuster wasn’t part of the Senate rules when it was created.
The House and Senate in the first Congress in 1789 both had a rule that allowed a simple majority to end debate and call for a final vote, according to , a professor of political science at George Washington University who on the history of the filibuster. The rule was rarely invoked, and it was dropped by the Senate in 1806, allowing for unlimited debates. But filibusters didn’t become an issue until the mid-1800s, when the Senate “grew larger and more polarized along party lines,” Binder in testimony before the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration in 2010.
