Filibuster Quotes

Voter suppression laws, overzealous filibuster use, you name it - the Republicans use every tactic they can to stop our democracy from actually selecting the person with the most support.

This is a president [Barack Obama] who came into office in 2008 with a big majority in the House and with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Because of his policies and his conduct in office, seven years later, we have our largest majority in the House since 1928, and we have a majority in the Senate and we have 31 of the 60 governorships.

So I put that all together and I find it makes it hard to justify a filibuster.

I would never filibuster any President’s judicial nominee, period. I might vote against them, but I will always see they came to a vote.

The only tool the Democrats have is in the Senate, and it's the filibuster.

The next time you do a filibuster, keep walking around.

I will not let the patriot act, the most un-patriotic of acts, go unchallenged.

There is no Senate rule governing the proper uses of the filibuster.

You know, the purpose of reconciliation is to avoid the filibuster. The filibuster is an effort to talk something to death.

It used to be in the Senate that if you were filibustering, you stood up, there was a physical dimension to it, that you when you became exhausted, you'd have to leave the floor. That was the idea of the filibuster.

Filibusters should require 35 senators to... make a commitment to continually debate an issue in reality, not just in theory. The number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster should be reduced to 55 from 60.

I have allowed the president to pick his political appointees…But I will not sit quietly and let him shred the Constitution.

There are two ways of looking at the talking filibuster. My way is as a form of unanimous consent.

In the first 50 years of the filibuster, it was used only 35 times. But the last Congress alone had 112 cloture motions filed, plus threats of more. This is the tyranny of the minority.

They say that women talk too much. If you have worked in Congress you know that the filibuster was invented by men.

Filibuster has long tradition, but used to harm civil rights.

The power of the silent filibuster to distort Senate politics is now accepted on Capitol Hill and by the press as normal and not worth mentioning. Let me be the skunk at this political garden party and say this stinks. Representative government was not designed to work this way by the Founding Fathers.

If Trump wins, the only thing blocking complete implementation of the programs of Trump, Paul Ryan, the Koch brothers, etc., is the Senate filibuster by the Democrats.

President Barack Obama has it right - there is a lot to change about Washington. The problem is, not much will get changed unless we confront the runaway filibuster in the U.S. Senate.

During the Obama years, the Republicans have done an unprecedented amount of stonewalling on cabinet-and-below appointees. I would also argue that their war on judicial nominees has been way beyond what went before. Really, if the president nominated God to serve on the D.C. Court of Appeals, Mitch McConnell would threaten a filibuster.

In trying to explain our political paralysis, analysts cite President Obama's tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for important legislation. These are large factors to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit of all: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.

Filibusters have proliferated because under current rules just one or two determined senators can stop the Senate from functioning. Today, the mere threat of a filibuster is enough to stop a vote; senators are rarely asked to pull all-nighters like Jimmy Stewart in 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.'

Eleanor Roosevelt fights for an anti-lynch law with the NAACP, with Walter White and Mary McLeod Bethune. And she begs FDR to say one word, say one word to prevent a filibuster or to end a filibuster. From '34 to '35 to '36 to '37 to '38, it comes up again and again, and FDR doesn't say one word. And the correspondence between them that we have, I mean, she says, "I cannot believe you're not going to say one word." And she writes to Walter White, "I've asked FDR to say one word. Perhaps he will." But he doesn't. And these become very bitter disagreements.

The filibuster is an affront to commonly understood democratic norms, but then so is the Senate.

Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I'm a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I've got Tourette's. My mouth won't quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I'm reading aloud, my Adam's apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of themselves, husks of empty breath and tone.

Before the nineteen-seventies, most Republicans in Washington accepted the institutions of the welfare state, and most Democrats agreed with the logic of the Cold War. Despite the passions over various issues, government functioned pretty well. Legislators routinely crossed party lines when they voted, and when they drank; filibusters in the Senate were reserved for the biggest bills; think tanks produced independent research, not partisan talking points. The "D." or "R." after a politician's name did not tell you what he thought about everything, or everything you thought about him.

I mean, if you go back to 1960 on major pieces of legislation, the filibuster was used about eight percent of the time.