What most people don’t understand is that the filibuster is an abomination that was created by accident. Once it was discovered, it was used for a century to undermine all civil rights legislation. The Senate loved this because the secretly racist Senators could rely on the openly racist ones to target bills they didn’t really want to support anyway.

Over time they strengthened the filibuster while also making it easier to deploy. At this point all that is needed to have a filibuster is for a staffer to email intent of the filibuster in order for it to be in effect. What typically happens is the filibustering party will email the intent to filibuster on a Friday and then everyone who doesn’t support the bill goes home for the weekend and the bill dies.

A super majority requirement in the Senate was never the founders intent. They had tried the super majority requirement in the articles of confederation and it was an abysmal failure.

The filibuster is a tool of oppression and gridlock, and should be abolished.

With the filibuster in place, you’re not going to be able to pass a bunch of popular bills that President Trump is forced to veto. And you’re not going to be able to put Senate Republicans on the spot and force them to vote against popular bills either. So a lot of what people want Democrats to do out of the gate next year isn’t actually going to happen. It’ll peter out in parliamentary minutiae.

The filibuster is really a cloture vote. Cloture is supposed to mean “Let’s stop talking about this and get to a vote already”. A supermajority is needed for it, because the idea was that a simple majority might be insufficient to cut off debate before a vote, because the other folks might still have valid things to say.

Now, if the folks who vote against cloture were really interested in still talking about it, maybe it would make sense. But the way the fillibuster is used these days, when they vote against cloture, it’s not because they want to keep talking about it, it’s because they want to talk about something else instead. Thst shouldn’t be the point. They should continue to talk about the matter at hand until they drive it to a conclusion.

If I were King of the Senate, anyone who votes against a cloture bill should be recognized afterwards to say what they needed to say about the bill, and then they should be prevented from voting against the next cloture vote. After all, they voted “no” on cloture because they had something further to say, and then they said it, why should they gum it up further?