On the recordJanuary 27, 2011
Time and time again last year, during the Rules Committee hearings on rules reform, my Republican colleagues said that any attempt to change the filibuster would make the Senate no different than the House. They said reforming the filibuster would be contrary to our Founders' intent to make the Senate a more deliberative body. This argument makes little sense to me. The filibuster was never part of the original Senate--the Founders made this body distinct from the House in many ways, but the filibuster is not one of them. A letter from seven prominent political science scholars, six of whom testified in last year's Rules Committee hearings, states the following: [T]here is no explicit constitutional right to filibuster. In fact, there is ample evidence that the framers preferred majority rather than supermajority voting rules. The framers knew full well the difficulties posed by supermajority rules, given their experiences in the Confederation Congress under the Articles of Confederation (which required a supermajority vote to pass measures on the most important matters). A common result was stalemate; legislators frequently found themselves unable to muster support from a supermajority of the states for essential matters of governing.
