Filibuster: Obstruction and Lawmaking in the U.S. Senate

by Gregory J. Wawro, Eric Schickler

Parliamentary obstruction, popularly known as the "filibuster," has been a defining feature of the U.S. Senate throughout its history. In this book, Gregory J. Wawro and Eric Schickler explain how the Senate managed to satisfy its lawmaking role during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when it lacked seemingly essential formal rules for governing debate.


What prevented the Senate from self-destructing during this time? The authors argue that in a system where filibusters played out as wars of attrition, the threat of rule changes prevented the institution from devolving into parliamentary chaos. They show that institutional patterns of behavior induced by inherited rules did not render Senate rules immune from fundamental changes.


The authors' theoretical arguments are supported through a combination of extensive quantitative and case-study analysis, which spans a broad swath of history. They consider how changes in the larger institutional and political context--such as the expansion of the country and the move to direct election of senators--led to changes in the Senate regarding debate rules. They further investigate the impact these changes had on the functioning of the Senate. The book concludes with a discussion relating battles over obstruction in the Senate's past to recent conflicts over judicial nominations.

Genres: Politics

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book that will entirely change your understanding of the U.S. Senate, and its most notable feature, the filibuster.

The main thesis of the book is that, contrary to what some researchers like Sarah Binder and Steven Smith might say, the Senate always had and probably always will have the means to end debates with a bare majority, and thus the filibuster is not the result of long-term "path dependence" caused by the happenstance removal of the "motion to the previous question" in 1807, but instead represents a "remote majoritarianism," where, despite all their complaints, Senators constantly refuse to strike down unlimited debate.

The authors show that a ruling from the chair (usually in history, the Vice President) on any motion could always be appealed, and that appeal could be tabled without debate (at least since the 1844, probably before) by a simple majority. That tabling would then set a "precedent" that would supersede any rules of the Senate. As long as a party or group had a sympathetic vice president, then, to set the tone and rule their way, and as long as they could summon a majority, they could make any rules they wanted. Today this is known as the "nuclear option," but the authors show it was prominent throughout the nineteenth century. Despite the absence of any cloture motion until 1917, almost no significant bills were successfully defeated by filibustering, because the bill's opponents always knew that the nuclear option was an option, and this, along with the norms of the Senate, kept them in line. By an intense analysis of individual votes he shows that the famous 1890 Lodge "force bill," to upheld black voting rights in the South, was not defeated by a Southern filibuster, but by the fact that the Republicans could not get a majority of their own caucus to support it. The majority ruled despite the lack of a cloture motion.

Still, many new precedents to limit debate were made in those years. In the 19th century "dilatory motions," such as constant quorum calls, were the main means to filibuster, but in 1879 the chair ruled and was sustained when he tried to count everybody in the chamber as part of a quorum, whether they raised their hands or not, in 1897 the chair ruled and was sustained that consecutive quorum calls without the conducting of "new business" were out of order. Finally, in 1908, after Robert LaFollette tried to block a monetary bill with quorum calls, the chair ruled and was upheld that debate was not "new business," and thus couldn't calls couldn't be conducted with out new votes or other business occurring first. These rulings lead filibustering to become what we know it today, as endless speeches instead of endless motions. Other rulings, like the one making unanimous consent agreements binding on the chair in 1914, also made the chamber run faster.

Although they focus on the 19th century, the authors show that filibustering only became truly determinative in the late 20th century, when the Senate's workload increased and the amount of time they spent in Washington decreased, which made "sitting out" filibusters impossible. Yet the revival of the "nuclear option" shows that this will always be a means for the majority to constrain the minority, and if the majority wanted to keep their members in DC and wait out a filibuster they could always do that.

Despite a lot of political science talk, and probably far too many regressions and statistical sets, this book finally explained to me the nature of Senate rules in a way every other book on the topic failed to do. Its a real public service the authors have performed in doing so.