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Comment by overboard2 | Hacker News Reader

The one person performing a filibuster is presumably doing so very much on record, complete with soundbites.

That's not the kind anyone means anymore, at least when it comes up in relation to the US Senate. They generally don't actually filibuster, they place a procedural hold that requires 60 members to agree to override it.

This is where the insanity really started. It used to require 8-20 senators to physically filibuster to actually kill a bill. On a major bill, the small number of senators also risked reputational harm from the sound bites of them reading their phone books.

Now anyone can start a filibuster, it largely goes unrecorded - and pressure for party unity prevents it from being killed.

So it sounds like it's an even smaller minority rule now?

Yep, during the Obama administration, Sen. Ted Cruz famously shut down the government for awhile, nearly by himself, pissing everybody on both sides off, except for the small number of people who vote in Republican primaries, who ate it up.

In an effort to provide balance, I'll point out that months before Cruz's stunt, Wendy Davis, a Texas state senator, filibustered for about 11 hours to prevent a vote on an abortion bill.

> people who vote in Republican primaries, who ate it up.

To the best of my knowledge nobody made a movie about Cruz's speech. Davis's speech, on the other hand, became the subject of a documentary debuting at SXSW:

https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/austin/news/2022/03/09/docu...

I honestly don't understand what point you're making.

You could have a single senator block the entire senate from delivering anything. The only back stop on this is whether a party would kick out a miss behaving senator or primary them.

Eh kinda - it’s that way because everyone wants the rules to be that way.

A large enough majority can just change the rules. It isn’t that hard to actually do.

But they prefer it this way.

No, fillibusters are a matter of procedure now. Nobody's standing up there talking to perform a fillibuster anymore.

From https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/filibustering-in-the-mod...

"When a Senator signals the intent to filibuster, an informal cloture process starts to determine if 60 votes exist to move a measure forward in two ways. One cloture vote is to approve a motion to consider a measure; the second vote is on the actual measure. If either cloture vote fails, the measure remains in limbo. "

If you want to see a real filibuster in action, go to Nebraska!

Machaela Cavanaugh has been filibustering the legislature for weeks! 12+ hours a day, weeks on end. She has monumentally impressive resolve.

Actually, I think you missed it. The Nebraska legislature finally passed a bill today.

That is great and all, but what folks are communicating here is quite different. Filibusters in the Senate do not require you to even show up, you can simply claim a filibuster to stop a vote from happening.

Not since 1972. https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/17/politics/filibuster-joe-biden...

You don't deserve to be downvoted for just not knowing that this isn't how the filibuster works anymore. All the well known pop culture treatments of it - Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The West Wing, etc. - show this form of it.

Yes but you have that be the person in the safest seat.

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