Filibuster

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, it is flattering when the Republican Senate leader comes to the floor and mentions your name, and Senator McConnell did just that this morning.

The issue was the filibuster. Senator McConnell found a quote several years ago where I spoke in favor of the filibuster to protect minority rights in the Senate. It is true. I did say that. It was based on life experience. Having already served in the Senate for a number of years, I came to understand how it evolved as one of the procedures in the Senate.

But I have to say to you that my impression of the filibuster changed, and the reason it changed was none other than the Republican Senate majority leader, now minority leader, Senator McConnell. You see, the filibuster really was created in the Senate through its own rules, as I explained yesterday, and it came to define the Senate in this respect. The Founding Fathers looked to the Senate to provide two representatives--literally, Senators--from each State, regardless of population, so smaller States, back in the original Colonies, like Delaware, would have the same number of Senators as a large State, like Virginia. That was their intention.

So the protection of minority rights was kind of built into the definition of the U.S. Senate, and the filibuster became its manifestation in the daily procedure of the Senate. Under that filibuster, of course, one Senator could stop the debate, or at least slow it down, by insisting on a filibuster, only to be stopped by an extraordinary majority of the Senate voting to return to the regular business.

That was the case in 1957 because, in August of 1957, Senator Strom Thurmond took to the floor of this U.S. Senate and initiated the longest filibuster in its history. For 24 hours and 18 minutes, the man stood by his desk and spoke without stopping. He didn't have any permission to leave the floor for any reason and certainly couldn't sit down without losing his filibuster. He did it. He did it for the wrong reason, I am afraid, because he was trying to stop the march of civil rights in this country, but he did it. Determinedly, he achieved that goal.

When he did, in 1957, that was the broken fifth filibuster in the history of the Senate in the previous five decades. In other words, if you went back to 1919 and all the way to 1957, Strom Thurmond's was the fifth time in history a filibuster was broken. Once every decade, a filibuster was broken on the Senate floor.

Well, that world has changed--dramatically changed. We can now have five filibusters in a couple of weeks. We now have, on average, 80 filibusters a year because of the urging and direction of the Senator from Kentucky, Senator McConnell. He has institutionalized the filibuster to the point where it is now the normal course of business, not an extraordinary procedure.

I recounted the fact that I introduced the DREAM Act 20 years ago--20 years ago. Durbin, what kind of a Senator are you that in 20 years you can't pass the DREAM Act? Well, I brought it to the Senate floor on five different occasions, and on five different occasions it was stopped by the filibuster. Other Members can tell the story of their legislative experience on the floor too.

The point I am getting to is this: It wasn't until Senator McConnell and the Republicans who follow him decided to make the filibuster just daily business in the Senate that it was abused to the point where the Senate stopped doing regular legislative business.

I would like Senator McConnell to come to the floor the next opportunity he has and explain this to me. In the last calendar year, 2020, the Senate considered 29 amendments on the floor of the Senate in the entire year. Now, that doesn't count a vote-arama, which is an aberration that I don't think would ever be accused of being deliberative. But 29 regular-order amendments during the course of a year--embarrassing, isn't it? When you think of this great so-called debating society, 29 times we brought an amendment to the floor? Well, it was an improvement--an improvement over the previous year, a 30- percent improvement, in fact--because in the year 2019, under Senator McConnell's leadership, we had 22 amendments.

So when Senator McConnell and others come to the floor and plead for us to hang on to the traditions of the Senate, I would tell you that their interpretation of the traditions is strangling this body. They have beaten the old filibuster to the point where it is hardly recognizable and is now the regular order of business in the U.S. Senate.

That is why many of us, frustrated with having worked so hard to come here, wanting to do the best we can to represent the people who have sent us here, are so frustrated by the current state of procedure. And for Senator McConnell and other Republicans to come to the floor and plead for hanging on to this tradition is actually pleading for the Senate to continue to do less and less each year.

There are those of us now in control on the majority side--the bare majority side--on the Democratic side, who really believe there is much more to be done in the Senate. The American people expect us to respond.

Now, you might ask: Well, how did you pass the American Rescue Plan if there is a filibuster used so frequently? It was under a process called reconciliation, which depends on a majority vote. You can't filibuster under the reconciliation. That is why this amazing bill, this new law, the American Rescue Plan by President Biden, is so sweeping in its reach. We had to try to combine, under this law, so many provisions that had been affected by the pandemic and the state of the economy because we knew that returning to the regular order of business with the filibuster looming every single day would tie our hands just as sure as we have seen in the past several years.

So, Senator McConnell, thank you for mentioning my name, but if I became skeptical of the filibuster, it is because of your use of it. I hope that you understand that you can't have it both ways. It can't be a rare procedure and be a procedure that dominates the actual business of the Senate as this has done for so many years.

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