Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The next time you do a filibuster, keep walking around.
No one ever built the filibuster rule. It just kind of was created.
There is no Senate rule governing the proper uses of the filibuster.
The only tool the Democrats have is in the Senate, and it's the filibuster.
I will not let the patriot act, the most un-patriotic of acts, go unchallenged.
So I put that all together and I find it makes it hard to justify a filibuster.
The filibuster is an affront to commonly understood democratic norms, but then so is the Senate.
There are two ways of looking at the talking filibuster. My way is as a form of unanimous consent.
President Obama had two Supreme Court nominees in his first term. There was no filibuster against them.
We have promised to do better, and no Republican concern should ever be enough to filibuster our own bill.
If I have to filibuster on the Senate floor, I'll even read the King James Bible until the wall is funded.
They say women talk too much. If you have worked in Congress you know that the filibuster was invented by men.
They say that women talk too much. If you have worked in Congress you know that the filibuster was invented by men.
I mean, if you go back to 1960 on major pieces of legislation, the filibuster was used about eight percent of the time.
The House of Representatives eliminated the filibuster way back in the 19th century, and somehow it managed to survive.
You know, the purpose of reconciliation is to avoid the filibuster. The filibuster is an effort to talk something to death.
My way of viewing the talking filibuster was as a way of doing unanimous consent with your feet. You object by going down and talking.
We've seen filibusters to block judicial nominations, jobs bills, political transparency, ending Big Oil subsidies - you name it, there's been a filibuster.
My view of the filibuster is either you've got to lower vote edge or make people really filibuster if they feel that seriously about a piece of legislation.
President Barack Obama has it right - there is a lot to change about Washington. The problem is, not much will get changed unless we confront the runaway filibuster in the U.S. Senate.
In the first 50 years of the filibuster, it was used only 35 times. But the last Congress alone had 112 cloture motions filed, plus threats of more. This is the tyranny of the minority.
Voter suppression laws, overzealous filibuster use, you name it - the Republicans use every tactic they can to stop our democracy from actually selecting the person with the most support.
I think what Americans need and what Mainers need more than anything is government that functions and I think that the filibuster prevents us from functioning and making progress on issues.
The filibuster is used more aggressively, so I think doing each individual appropriations bill through regular order would be a home run. But I think that we should try to hit a few singles.
It seems as though there are Members in this body who want to filibuster just about everything we try to do, whether it is stopping judicial nominations, the Energy bill, or this Medicare bill.
Filibusters should require 35 senators to... make a commitment to continually debate an issue in reality, not just in theory. The number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster should be reduced to 55 from 60.
We've seen filibusters of bills and nominations that ultimately passed with 90 or more votes. Why filibuster something that has that kind of support? Just to slow down the process and keep the Senate from working.
The Dream Act and the DISCLOSE Act, to name two, had majorities in both chambers during Obama's first term, but they were filibustered to death. They probably await a similar fate unless the filibuster is reformed.
We've always said a filibuster is not appropriate for judicial nominees. A filibuster is a legislative tool designed to extract compromises. A judicial nominee is a person. You can't take the arm or leg of a nominee.
It used to be in the Senate that if you were filibustering, you stood up. There was a physical dimension to it, that you - when you became exhausted you would have to leave the floor. That was the idea of the filibuster.
No one likes the Electoral College, expect perhaps those who were elected because of it. No one likes gerrymandering, except those doing the gerrymandering. No one likes the filibuster, except those doing the filibustering.
If the choice is between universal health care or fixing our broken immigration system or upholding a 60-vote filibuster rule that is nowhere in the Constitution, I'm going to choose actually making progress for the American people.
The argument most commonly made in the filibuster's favor is crudely partisan: 'Our side may be in the majority now, but someday it will be in the minority, and when that happens we'll want to block the other side's extremist agenda.'
When you use the word 'filibuster,' most of us in America - and I count myself among them - envision it as the ability to hold the floor on rare occasions to speak at length and make your point emphatically and even delay progress by taking hours.
In theory, the filibuster helps whichever party is in the minority in the Senate. In practice, it is the Republicans who have disproportionately used it to engage in cynical and anti-democratic obstructionism whenever they find themselves in the minority.
To be honest, I haven't seen much serious budget planning since the Republicans took control of the House after the 2010 elections and grabbed onto the Senate filibuster. It's not the White House's fault that John Boehner couldn't deliver on a bigger deal.
We demand that segregation be ended in every school district in the year 1963! We demand that we have effective civil rights legislation - no compromise, no filibuster - and that include public accommodations, decent housing, integrated education, FEPC and the right to vote.
For a whole year in elementary school, when the class marched down to the school library every week, I would refuse to return my book. I would just check it out again and again. Every week. For a whole year. The object of my fourth-grade filibuster was 'D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths.'
Healthy debate has been replaced by automatic sensors that eliminate the need for actual talking during a filibuster - a la 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.' Robust debate is necessary in a democratic society. Instead, our discourse has been relegated to media spin by expert entertainers.
When I became president with a commitment to reform health care, Hillary was a natural to head the health care task force. You all know we failed because we couldn't break a Senate filibuster. Hillary immediately went to work on solving the problems the bill sought to address one by one.
Filibusters have proliferated because under current rules just one or two determined senators can stop the Senate from functioning. Today, the mere threat of a filibuster is enough to stop a vote; senators are rarely asked to pull all-nighters like Jimmy Stewart in 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.'
The power of the silent filibuster to distort Senate politics is now accepted on Capitol Hill and by the press as normal and not worth mentioning. Let me be the skunk at this political garden party and say this stinks. Representative government was not designed to work this way by the Founding Fathers.
As every newspaper reader, liberal activist, or parliamentary junkie knows, the overarching barrier to most of Obama's agenda is the abuse of the filibuster in the Senate. In fact, several of Obama's second term priorities are not ideas in search of a majority - they are majorities in search of an up-or-down vote.
When George W. Bush tried to roll back taxpayer exposure to a housing crash via Fannie and Freddie, guess what two senators joined a filibuster of the Bush initiative? Yep... those saviors of the working class, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. They went to bat for the housing industry and voted to allow taxpayer exposure to escalate.
During the Obama years, the Republicans have done an unprecedented amount of stonewalling on cabinet-and-below appointees. I would also argue that their war on judicial nominees has been way beyond what went before. Really, if the president nominated God to serve on the D.C. Court of Appeals, Mitch McConnell would threaten a filibuster.