The End of the Filibuster in the Senate? by Charles Ashie

On Thursday 21st of November, there was a historic change in the Senate that in turn, will alter centuries of precedent. In the past, when a bill has got to the Second Reading, there is the opportunity for the opposition of the bill (normally the minority party) to essentially "talk a bill to death" 

This is called a filibuster. It can be done by an individual senator or a group of senators and they are not allowed to go to the toilet, or even sit down. 

 Filibuster topics have ranged from reading out extracts from the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, or even Green eggs & Ham by Dr Seuss. One may think that it is an impossible feat but the record for an individual senator goes to Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. 

A procedure known as cloture is necessary for a filibuster to be ended. This did require a super majority vote (60 votes, three-fifths of the Senate) as well as a signature from 16 senators. 

Filibusters and cloture motions in the Senate since 1919.
Picture Credit: Washington Post

 However as of last Thursday the Senate voted, in a 52 to 48 vote, to require only a majority vote to end a filibuster of certain executive and judicial nominees, not including Supreme Court nominees, rather than the 3/5 of votes previously required.

This is significant because it now allows President Obama to get Senate approval for a large number of executive appointments; numerous senior federal judges have not been appointed for example.

Useful for any G&P student contemplating the power of Congress and the Senate in particular. The power of the President is also an issue related to this too. Republicans were seemingly against any Obama appointment, so they stopped all of them. 

However as the Washington Post says here, the reforms mean that "Senate Republicans retain the power to slow, though not derail, Obama’s appointments". 

In addition to the links above, there is a long Huffington Post about it all here, and a blog post from the Washington Post also discusses it here.

Partisan Politics in the US Congress

In brief, the Economist this week had a great graph in the print edition that showed the partisanship of Congress in an extraordinary way:


 Picture: Renzo Lucioni, Imgur.com 

A Harvard Computer science student created a graph that shows the relationships between members of the Senate, indicating who is more bi-partisan, and who is not. Each dot is a member of the Senate, and the lines indicates a similarity between them and other members of the Senate.

Rather like a single cell dividing in biology, it is very clear over time that the two parties are separating, with fewer members of the Senate "crossing the floor" to cooperate with their opponents.

Compare the Senate voting behaviour of 1989 and 2013. Very useful for any G&P student contemplating the nature of Congress for Unit 4C, and whether it is effective or not. Is a Senate whose members do not cooperate with eachother, but instead behave as though they were in a parliamentary system, what the Founding Fathers wanted?

The Economist posted a video which discusses it: