The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [37]
But when the Democrats lost their Senate majority in 2002, they had only one arrow left in their quiver, a strategy that could be summed up in one word, the battle cry around which the Democratic faithful now rallied:
Filibuster!
The Constitution makes no mention of the filibuster; it is a Senate rule, one that dates back to the very first Congress. The basic idea is simple: Because all Senate business is conducted by unanimous consent, any senator can bring proceedings to a halt by exercising his right to unlimited debate and refusing to move on to the next order of business. In other words, he can talk. For as long as he wants. He can talk about the substance of a pending bill, or about the motion to call the pending bill. He can choose to read the entire seven-hundred-page defense authorization bill, line by line, into the record, or relate aspects of the bill to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the flight of the hummingbird, or the Atlanta phone book. So long as he or like-minded colleagues are willing to stay on the floor and talk, everything else has to wait—which gives each senator an enormous amount of leverage, and a determined minority effective veto power over any piece of legislation.
The only way to break a filibuster is for three-fifths of the Senate to invoke something called cloture—that is, the cessation of debate. Effectively this means that every action pending before the Senate—every bill, resolution, or nomination—needs the support of sixty senators rather than a simple majority. A series of complex rules has evolved, allowing both filibusters and cloture votes to proceed without fanfare: Just the threat of a filibuster will often be enough to get the majority leader’s attention, and a cloture vote will then be organized without anybody having to spend their evenings sleeping in armchairs and cots. But throughout the Senate’s modern history, the filibuster has remained a preciously guarded prerogative, one of the distinguishing features, it is said—along with six-year terms and the allocation of two senators to each state, regardless of population—that separates the Senate from the House and serves as a firewall against the dangers of majority overreach.
There is another, grimmer history to the filibuster, though, one that carries special relevance for me. For almost a century, the filibuster was the South’s weapon of choice in its efforts to protect Jim Crow from federal interference, the legal blockade that effectively gutted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Decade after decade, courtly, erudite men like Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia (after whom the most elegant suite of Senate offices is named) used the filibuster to choke off any and every piece of civil rights legislation before the Senate, whether voting rights bills, or fair employment bills, or anti-lynching bills. With words, with rules, with procedures and precedents—with law—Southern senators had succeeded in perpetuating black subjugation in ways that mere violence never could. The filibuster hadn’t just stopped bills. For many blacks in the South, the filibuster had snuffed out hope.
Democrats used the filibuster sparingly in George Bush’s first term: Of the President’s two-hundred-plus judicial nominees, only ten were prevented from getting to the floor for an up-or-down vote. Still, all ten were nominees to appellate courts, the courts that counted; all ten were standard-bearers for the conservative cause; and if Democrats maintained their filibuster on these ten fine jurists, conservatives argued, there would be nothing to prevent them from having their way with future Supreme Court nominees.
So it came