Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

It wasn’t until 1917, when a group of senators filibustered President Woodrow Wilson’s bill to arm American merchant ships against German submarines for twenty-three days, that Wilson, a trained political scientist with strong views about proper parliamentary procedure, convinced the Senate to adopt a cloture rule allowing filibusters to be broken by a two-thirds majority of the body. And it wasn’t until 1975 that the threshold was lowered to its current three-fifths level. Given the way today’s weakened filibuster paralyzes the US Senate, how did the body survive, and even thrive, in this long era of unbreakable filibusters? The answer is that though the rules made the filibuster far more powerful for most of American history, the norms made it weaker. The filibuster was barely used. Just because a senator, a group of senators, or a party full of senators could filibuster didn’t mean they would. After all, if everyone was filibustering all the time, how would the Senate ever get anything done?