Filibuster Rule

Floor Speech

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

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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