Primer: Filibuster
On October 1, 2025, the federal government of the United States entered a shutdown after Congress failed to pass appropriations legislation for the 2026 fiscal year, which began that day. Although a Republican spending plan received a majority of votes in the Senate, it failed to advance because it could not overcome a sixty-vote filibuster.
In the United States Senate, the filibuster is a procedural rule in which a senator may prolong debate in order to delay or obstruct a decision on a proposed piece of legislation. Ending a filibuster requires cloture, a separate procedure that brings debate to a close and allows a vote to proceed, but only if sixty senators agree. In effect, this rule thus imposes a supermajority requirement on most legislation.
The filibuster has deep historical roots: in the Roman Republic, senators would speak until nightfall to prevent legislation from being voted upon. Originally, the US Senate had no formal means of ending debate at all, with the only limit on filibustering being the physical endurance of the participants. It was not until 1917, amid frustration with obstruction over wartime measures, that the chamber adopted the first cloture rule requiring a two-thirds vote. That threshold was lowered to sixty votes in 1975, and subsequent reforms in 2013 and 2017 eliminated the filibuster for executive and judicial nominations. Over time, as the Senate introduced a “two-track” system allowing other business to proceed during a filibuster, effectively ending the requirement that senators physically hold the floor to maintain one.
Episodes like the current government shutdown raise the question of whether or not the filibuster functions as a safeguard of deliberation or as yet another source of paralysis for an already sclerotic institution. Defenders contend that it remains a vital check on majority power. By forcing agreement beyond a narrow margin, they argue, the rule encourages a politics of consensus and prevents certain transient electoral passions from overturning established law. In this view, the Senate’s design as the slower, more reflective chamber finds its procedural expression in the filibuster. Abolishing it, defenders warn, would open up the Senate, which is already undemocratically constituted, to the sort of majoritarian vicissitude that it was meant to avoid.
Critics, however, maintain that the filibuster, especially in its modern form, is just a tool for political obstructionism, allowing a given minority to stall nearly all significant legislation. They note that the Constitution requires supermajorities only in exceptional cases — treaties, veto overrides, and Constitutional amendments — and that ordinary lawmaking was deliberately designed to rest on majority rule. Throughout the twentieth century, for instance, the filibuster was an important legislative tool by which civil rights legislation was delayed or defeated.
Very often the filibuster debate tends to reflect the particular political conditions of a time. Calls for abolition grow loudest when a party holds a narrow majority and finds its agenda blocked, only to fade once it falls back into the minority. The question at hand, then, must be considered both on the basis of principle and with a pragmatic view of the changeable winds of American politics.
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"Filibuster" by Tobias Higbie is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.