Last Thursday, I sat in a hospital waiting room in Richmond, Virginia, while my wife was undergoing abdominal surgery. A bit after noon, my phone buzzed. It was a CNN ‘breaking news’ alert:
The Democratic-controlled Senate today voted to invoke the so-called nuclear option out of frustration over Republicans who have been blocking President Barack Obama’s nominees.
The controversial move is a rules change that could make a partisan environment even more divisive because it takes away the right for the Senate’s minority party to filibuster.
Under the old rules it took 60 votes to break a filibuster. The change now allows most filibusters of Obama nominees to be stopped with 51 votes—a simple Senate majority.
I could do without CNN’s amateurish characterization of the Democratic senators’ motivations, and a bit more context would have been welcome (although I do understand that news alerts must be brief) . . . but still, I got the point. The Democratic majority in the United States Senate managed to do exactly what a Republican majority considered doing in 2005, before being stymied by Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and the bipartisan ‘Gang of Fourteen.’
The ‘filibuster’ is an unusual nuance of the Senate rules that allows senators the privilege to speak as long as they want on any topic they want, and they can only be stopped by a vote of ‘cloture’—which requires a three-fifths (sixty-vote) super-majority. In practice, an individual senator can hold-up or stop a vote on a bill by simply talking, and talking, and talking . . . unless enough fellow senators can be convinced to vote to make him stop.
