[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 12 (Thursday, January 27, 2011)]
[Senate]
[Pages S331-S332]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            FILIBUSTER RULE

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, while Senator Merkley and Senator

[[Page S332]]

Udall are still on the floor, I wish to extend a word of appreciation 
to both of them for the work they put into trying to solve the problem 
of the filibuster--more particularly, the problem of the abuse of the 
filibuster rule in this body.
  We have come to a resolution that is not the rules change many of us 
hoped for. Experience will be the test of whether the understanding 
that has been reached between the leaders has any meaning or impact in 
the way this Chamber conducts its business. I hope that experience 
shows this was a productive agreement. If not, we will have to come 
back and revisit the rule.
  I very much doubt the agreement that was reached between the two 
leaders and expressed on the floor today would have happened had it not 
been for the efforts of a great number of Senators who argued very hard 
for this change but most particularly Senator Tom Udall and Senator 
Jeff Merkley. I am very pleased to stand and give them a word of 
recognition for the enormous amount of effort and energy and 
persistence and argument and conviction that all went into this effort.
  I will close with one point that I think bears remembering as we 
evaluate whether the test of experience is met in the future, and that 
is what the filibuster changed into, what was really going on on the 
floor as we all sat in the Chamber.
  We remember the glory days of the filibuster when you had Senators on 
the floor reading from the phonebook, standing here as long as they 
could. The famous example of it from Hollywood, of course, was 
Jefferson Smith in the famous movie by Frank Capra, ``Mr. Smith Goes to 
Washington.'' There is that wonderful scene in the movie where the 
reporter is upstairs in the gallery, and he is covering what Jimmy 
Stewart is doing down here. He describes the filibuster. He is talking 
into his microphone. He says: The filibuster is going on down there. It 
is democracy's finest show--the right to talk your head off. The 
American privilege of free speech in its most dramatic form. One lone 
and single American holding the greatest floor in the land, bleary-
eyed, voice gone. You can hear the drama of it. That was the filibuster 
of old, and that is the filibuster Americans understand. It made it 
very hard for Americans to understand when we said: Oh, there is a 
filibuster going on in the Senate, and they turned on C-SPAN and there 
was nobody here. The Senate floor was silent, except for the quiet 
voice of the clerk slowly droning through the names of Senators in a 
tedious, ineffectual quorum call.
  The quorum call became the emblem of the modern filibuster. Why is 
that? That is because the filibuster rule requires a 30-hour debate 
period when cloture is invoked to stop a filibuster. If you are the 
minority party and you can force the majority leader to invoke cloture, 
what have you just done? You have accomplished a very valuable prize: 
You have taken 30 hours of the time of this Senate and you have 
dedicated it to debate on a proposition and you do not actually have to 
debate the proposition. You just let the quorum calls roll, and you 
burn 30 hours of the Senate's time.
  The New York Times reported that Democrats have been forced to break 
275 filibusters in the past two Congresses. If we had to burn the 30 
hours for cloture in every one of those filibusters, the math on that 
is 8,250 hours lost to the Senate, lost to silence and ineffectual, 
droning quorum calls. If you count 8-hour days, that is more than 1,000 
days of time wasted, of work undone, of the authority of the Senate and 
of this branch of the U.S. Government stripped away and consigned to 
the dustbin of wasted time.
  The test as we go forward is going to be how often that strategy of 
just burning the time of the Senate is used. One important measure is, 
will we see these filibusters and forced cloture motions on things that 
end up being not very contentious? The people would ask me: Why are 
they filibustering this? They don't really object to this.
  This is not like civil rights in the old days when people were 
violently opposed to it. They would come to the floor, and they would 
filibuster their heads off. This is a different strategy. Under the 
modern strategy, you do not just filibuster the bills you hate; you 
filibuster everything because that is more of those 30-hour blocks of 
time burned, chucked in the dustbin, unavailable for the work of this 
body and this country.
  I hope very much that the spirit of this shows itself in experience 
on the floor. I applaud Senator Alexander and Senator Schumer for 
having reached that agreement. I applaud the two leaders for having 
formalized it in their colloquy on the Senate floor earlier today. But, 
as Ronald Reagan used to say, trust but verify. And we will have the 
chance to verify in the coming weeks and months whether, in fact, the 
abuse of this rule is done with and we get back to being the Senate of 
which we can be proud or whether the abuse continues and we continue to 
be a Senate frustrated by endless quorum calls and delay and 
obstruction and a continued inability to do the basic business of this 
country. I hope we turn out much for the better.
  I yield the floor.

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