Reply #3: Or if you don't want to click [View All]

[jmowreader]

The Filibuster is the most feared weapon in a minority-party Senator's arsenal. It is used to get rid of rotten bills that are beloved by the majority. (The majority doesn't need to launch filibusters; there are other ways for the majority party to kill bills.)

The Filibuster takes advantage of two peculiarities of Senate rules: once recognized, a Senator has the floor until he or she wants to relinquish it (and he or she can decide who they want to relinquish it to), and once a Senator starts speaking, he or she doesn't have to stay on topic. In the House of Representatives, members are issued a certain length of time to speak about something and they (1) must stay within that time and (2) must stay on subject. If you can watch House of Representatives proceedings on C-SPAN, you'll hear "Mr. Jones has the floor for three minutes" or "Mrs. Smith has the floor for one minute." That doesn't happen in the Senate.

In a Filibuster, Senator Smith will be recognized and then start speaking on any damn thing that comes to mind. They've been known to read the telephone book. They can tell fishing stories. Anything. And while Senator Smith is talking about the 200-pound tuna he caught in the Gulf Stream last summer, no other business can take place.

There are two ways to shut down a filibuster: cloture and killing the rotten bill. It requires 67 members to vote to invoke cloture, and if it happens the filibuster can continue for two more days before it's required to end. (Remember that the Senate is currently 55-44-1 and the 1 votes Democratic; the odds of pulling 12 Democrats to the Republicans' side is very slim and highly dependent on how much pork is doled out to the Dems.) If the majority withdraws the bill, the filibuster generally stops immediately because there's no longer a need for it.

(Oh yeah: the biggest tuna ever pulled out of the ocean off the coast of North Carolina is a 744-pound bluefin that was caught in 1995. In about a month and a half, three or four 200-pound-plus tunas will come in every week. And they're all destined for the same place: sushi bars in Japan. There's a buyer from Tokyo who lives in Wilmington.)