Filibuster

The topic I have chosen to write about is the filibuster. The filibuster is a very important and unique issue in American government. The filibuster is used in the Senate to slow up or derail bills. It is also used to block judicial nominees, threatened most recently to be used against Judge Alito. It is a very strong tool especially to the minority party. The minority can use it to make a point or to try and get their way. The filibuster may be very upsetting to the majority party but will be very important to them when they one day become the minority party.

The filibuster has come very far in its origin. The tern filibuster originally was someone that went around reeking havic on people, most commonly pirates. In the middle of the nineteenth century many of these groups of people organized in the U.S. and went into Central America and the West Indies and started revolutions. These people became known in English as filibusters which was derived from the Spanish filibustero. In the early nineteenth century a senator named John Randolph from Virginia got in the habit of making long speeches on the Senate floor. The Senators soon got fed up with these long and irrelevant speeches and voted to give all right to the presiding officer to deal with such problems. This is when it gets interesting because in 1872 Schuyler Colfax, the Vice President, ruled that “under the practice of the Senate the presiding officer could not restrain a Senator in remarks which the Senate considers pertinent to the pending issue”. This tactic soon became widely used in the Senate was compared to military adventurers, or filibusterers. People began to say that a Senator was filibustering.

Filibusters can be a very strong tool for the minority in the Senate. A Senator or his minority party can block full Senate consideration of a bill or a nomination by prolonged debate of the proposal. This is especially important to the Senate if there is only 50-59 Senators that are in favor of passing a bill.