In the Senate, when opponents of a bill try to delay and defeat its passage, supporters of the bill will seek to vote cloture, to cut off debate and bring the bill to a vote. The House of Representatives, because of its larger number of members, made majority rule easier to achieve. In 1842, the House adopted a standing rule that no member could speak for more than one hour on any issue under debate. Subsequent five-minute rules and one-minute rules reduced even further the time that members could speak on amendments. The House Rules Committee controls how long the House will debate a bill, prohibits nongermane (irrelevant) amendments, and sets the time for a vote.
The Senate has remained more tolerant of the right to unlimited debate. Until 1917, the Senate had no effective way of shutting off a filibuster, or delaying tactics. During the closing days of the session that year, a group of isolationist senators, who were opposed to the United States entering World War I, filibustered against a bill to arm U.S. merchant ships. President Woodrow Wilson denounced them as a “little group of willful men” and called on the Senate to change its rules. The Senate responded by adopting Rule 22, which provided that a two-thirds vote of all senators could cut off debate.
Cloture difficult to achieve even with Rule 22
The Senate tried eleven times between 1927 and 1962 to invoke cloture but failed each time. Southern senators especially relied on the filibuster to block civil rights legislation. They gained allies in senators from smaller states who refused to vote for cloture because they themselves might need to filibuster to protect their states’ interests. In 1957, Senate majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson (Democrat-Texas) won passage of the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction but at the price of a severely watered-down bill. As President in 1964, Johnson called for stronger civil rights legislation. With the support of Republican minority leader Everett Dirksen, Northern Democrats and Republicans at last were able to invoke cloture and break the Southern filibuster.
In 1975, the Senate reduced the number of votes necessary for cloture from two-thirds (67) to three-fifths (60) of the 100-member Senate. Some senators wanted to change the rule to require only a simple majority (51), but Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (Democrat–Montana) objected. Mansfield believed it was important to retain some way for the minority to check the majority. By then, even moderate and liberal senators had resorted to filibusters to block legislation they found offensive.
Post-cloture tactics
Invoking cloture does not automatically stop all delaying tactics. In the 1970s, after rule changes made cloture easier to achieve, Senator James Allen (Democrat–Alabama) invented the post-cloture filibuster. Opponents load a bill up with amendments before cloture because under the terms of cloture they will have 100 hours to debate any amendment. But in 1977 Senate majority leader Robert C. Byrd (Democrat–West Virginia) arranged for the Vice President, as presiding officer, to declare a long list of such amendments out of order. But a minority of senators can still find enough loopholes in the Senate cloture rule to stall a bill long enough to amend or kill it.
See also Filibuster
Sources
- Walter J. Oleszek, Congressional Procedures and the Policy Process (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1989)