Filibuster

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, first, let me salute my colleague and friend from South Dakota. I hope we can achieve what he has asked for: bipartisanship in the U.S. Senate.

He made a point that I would like to amplify: that they have not even used the filibuster; Republicans have not invoked the filibuster so far during this Senate session. Well, there is a reason--because the three things that we have done in this session are not, under the rules of the Senate, subject to filibuster.

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, there are three things that are not subject to a filibuster: an impeachment trial, which we have accomplished so far this year; the nominations, which the Senator from South Dakota alluded to; and the reconciliation bill. It is true, Republicans did not apply the filibuster to that. But it wasn't their good will that motivated it; the Senate rules demanded it.

The question is, Can we reach a point where we do things on a bipartisan basis, or will it be stopped by a filibuster? So let me pause at this moment and say to those following the debate what a filibuster is all about. It is a time-honored tradition in the Senate, going back to Aaron Burr serving as Vice President, that people can speak in an unlimited fashion on the floor--there is nothing to stop them--until there came a cloture vote, which didn't appear until the early 20th century. Before that, the Senator could hold the floor indefinitely and slow things down to a crawl, to a stop if necessary. The filibuster allowed them to continue that, but then came the cloture motion, which stopped the filibustering. It initially took a two-thirds vote, 67, and eventually 60 votes. But that is what it boils down to.

If you want to get anything done on the floor and you don't want one Senator to stand up and say ``I refuse to accept the vote,'' then you have to have 60 votes. So in a majority Senate, 51 would clearly be sufficient. Under a filibuster, 60 is required. There are 50 Democrats, 50 Republicans. Vice President Kamala Harris can be the tie-breaking vote, the 51st vote. So the Republicans, by applying the filibuster rule, could require 60 votes, which, of course, the Democrats by themselves, even with the Vice President, couldn't come up with.

There was a statement made by Senator McConnell, the Republican leader, yesterday which was nothing short of amazing. At a press conference, he said of the filibuster: ``It has no racial history at all--none.'' Amazing that he would say that.

If you go back and study the history of this body, John Caldwell Calhoun, a Senator from South Carolina, started in the early parts of the 19th century using this unlimited debate to protect slave States, to protect the interests of the Southern States. That progressed in history to the point where, in modern times, at least in the 20th century, the filibuster was used consistently to stop federalization of the crime of lynching. I don't know who would argue in Kentucky or anywhere else that the crime of lynching has nothing to do with race, but the filibuster was used to prevent the federalization of that crime.

It was used in an effort to stop the bills that were trying to outlaw a poll tax. Poll tax? That meant you had to pay to be able to vote. It was used in the South to try to discourage African Americans from voting. It clearly was racial, and the filibuster was used over and over again to protect a vote on the Senate floor, this Senate floor, from taking place on the poll tax.

Then fast-forward several decades to the 1960s. Richard Russell of Georgia engineered--he was the architect, the legislative architect of the filibuster that stopped the civil rights bills in the 1960s. Certainly Senator McConnell, who was working in the Senate at that time as an intern, if I am not mistaken, must remember the filibuster being used against the civil rights bill. And to say that the filibuster ``has no racial history at all--none'' is to ignore the obvious.

Here is the point we are getting to. Senator Schumer has said it on the floor, and others have said it as well. We have to be productive in this session of the Senate. After the last 4 years, we have seen the Senate really break down to the point where they weren't productive at all. We weren't productive at all.

There were 29 amendment votes in the last year of Senator McConnell's reign as Republican leader. Twenty-nine amendment votes in 1 year? The previous year under Senator McConnell: 22 amendment votes; no activity on the floor of the Senate. We can't let that happen. There are things that need to be done.

Let me mention, too, that one of them that certainly needs to be done is to protect America's right to vote. The Senator from South Dakota comes and says: Well, we had this big turnout on November 3, 2020, and now the Democrats are meeting and talking about changing the voting laws. Why would we want to change if we had such a big turnout?

He ignores what happened in between. After the election returns of November 3, 2020, Republicans across the Nation, in 40 different States, introduced hundreds of bills to limit people's right to vote. That is why we are responding with this Federal response that is now being considered in the Senate Rules Committee.

He missed part of the equation. It went from November 3rd's big turnout to efforts in State legislatures to restrict turnout, to limit the rights of people to vote across America, especially African Americans and Latinos and those who are not wealthy--to limit their right to vote. And then came this response on the Federal basis. That is an important point. If we believed that the filibuster would not be used against it, if there was some promise that it wouldn't be, we certainly could bring that bill to the floor for debate, and we should, if we are given that kind of assurance.

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