Quotes About Filibuster

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.

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.

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.

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.

President Obama had two Supreme Court nominees in his first term. There was no filibuster against them.

When President Donald Trump nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch to serve on the Supreme Court, I said that he deserved a fair hearing and a vote. I said this even though Senate Republicans filibustered dozens of President Obama's judicial nominees and then stopped President Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Judge Merrick Garland.

Translated into Senate votes, a minority share of the ballots would have yielded a filibuster-proof conservative majority based largely in the South and the Rocky Mountain West. The filibuster itself further increases the power of the smaller and mostly more conservative states: in principle, senators representing roughly 11 percent of the nation's population can produce the 41 votes now required to block action.

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.

Healthy debate has been replaced by automatic sensors that eliminate the need for actual talking during a filibuster - a la 'Mr.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.

Cloture is simply cutting off debate.

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.

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.

The Founders surely never imagined that a three-fifths majority would be the standard requirement for passing legislation in the upper chamber, and for most of American history it wasn't. But filibuster use skyrocketed in 1993, when Republicans found themselves locked out of the White House and big Democratic congressional majorities.

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.

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.

We have promised to do better, and no Republican concern should ever be enough to filibuster our own bill.

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.

Republicans have used the filibuster to turn the Senate into a de facto 60-vote body.

We shouldn't deny the right of the minority to filibuster, but we need to do a much better job of making them own it. That way, the American people could figure out who is being obstructionist and who is willing to compromise.

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.

I mean, if you go back to 1960 on major pieces of legislation, the filibuster was used about eight percent of the time.

Please don't ask me to do that which I've just said I'm not going to do, because you're burning up time. The meter is running through the sand on you, and I am now filibustering.

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.

The House of Representatives eliminated the filibuster way back in the 19th century, and somehow it managed to survive.