The Senate is a lot of things: a debating society, a breeding ground for filibusters.
Walter Lippmann, the establishment liberal columnist, had long defended filibusters as a critical protection of minority rights.
The Senate amendments needed 60 votes to pass under an agreement between party leaders designed to avoid time-consuming filibusters.
You had to cast more votes to break filibusters last year than in the entire 1950s and '60s combined.
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But nobody holds court, nobody filibusters, nobody uses the three hours to demonstrate how smart he or she is.
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But Republicans say there's no such guarantee, just an agreement to allow filibusters while the Democrats are on good behavior.
Perhaps it was seizing on a general weariness as well as wariness in the Senate over the whole issue of filibusters.
Now the question is whether they will end up with 60 seats, which would let them swan past any Republican filibusters.
Democrats have used filibusters to block a handful of Bush's court picks, arguing they are too conservative to be fair judges.
He can bring it up if he wants to, but he'll get beat, just like some of these filibusters may be threatened.
Needless to say, it is far easier to attract attention with noisy public hearings and dogged filibusters than through workaday legislative compromise.
But the number of filibusters by Republicans has escalated, and they have been far more willing to use the tactic than their opponents.
Prior to the death of Edward Kennedy last August, the Democrats had held 60 seats in the Senate, meaning they could block Republican filibusters.
For weeks, the press had been reporting on the use of silent filibusters to hold up nominations and on the attempts at filibuster reform.
Actual talking filibusters have become rare in the Senate, where the rules are typically used in procedural ways to block the other party's agenda.
But Reid, D-Nevada, said both parties need to "end the bickering" over Frist's threat to use Senate rules to eliminate filibusters of Bush's court picks.
Legislative filibusters are used to force the majority to reshape laws.
Republican Senators Scott Brown (R-MA), Susan Collins (R-ME) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) are willing to break filibusters over deficit spending but to date, not on tax increases.
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Maybe there should be a day where, for example, with the filibusters, senators actually have to hang around and filibuster -- properly act out the verb, right?
But since the Senate has an even stronger rural bias than the House and requires a supermajority of 60 to avoid filibusters, things could get even messier.
The Senate cast more votes to break filibusters last year than in the entire 1950s and '60s combined, making it nearly impossible to come to agreement on key legislation.
Polls show only a minority of Americans are willing to change the rules so that filibusters can be stopped with just 50 votes instead of 60, even on judicial nominations.
"With little chance of cross-party agreement, legislating became guerrilla warfare, marked by cloture motions and filibusters, legitimate devices in the senatorial arsenal but hardly the path to well-crafted legislation to attract bipartisan support, " she wrote.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said at the time that Halligan met the "extraordinary circumstances" standard for a filibuster under a 2005 Senate agreement that allowed filibusters of judicial nominees only in extreme cases.
After the Republicans lost their majority in 2006, filibusters became everyday events: there were a hundred and twelve cloture votes in 2007 and 2008, and this session Republicans are on target to break their own filibuster record.
Now -- and don't quote me on this -- there are, I mean, stacks of quotes from Republicans on judges just a few years ago on filibusters, on nominations, on the need for that process to go forward.
Instead, financial reform became a slightly more polite repeat of the health-care-reform brawl: the Republicans threatened filibusters, the Democrats threatened all-nighters, and thousands of lobbyists prowled the Capitol, charging their Wall Street clients more than a billion dollars.
During floor debate earlier this month, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell reiterated the view of many of his colleagues that Halligan met the "extraordinary circumstances" standard, under a 2005 Senate agreement that allowed filibusters of judicial nominees only in extreme cases.
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