Among the better features of the English language is that it leaves room for its users to make up words of their own—blog, for example—import words from other tongues—rendezvous, comes to mind—or freight old words with new meanings—like filibuster.
Filibuster, derived from the Dutch vrijbuiter, entered our lexicon before 1591 as synonym for freebooters, those high-seas entrepreneurs otherwise called pirates. In ante-bellum America, the term was applied to adventurers who went to places like Nicaragua and Mexico to overthrow their governments and annex them to the Union as slave states. By 1889, it meant, according to the O.E.D., “an act of obstruction in a legislative assembly,” especially in the United States.
Today we use the word almost exclusively in reference to the United States Senate whose peculiar rules allow debate on a bill to continue until sixty senators agree to put the measure to a vote. That agreement is called cloture, a word that comes from the French clôture, meaning “ending.” Absent cloture, forty-one senators can hijack a piece of legislation and talk it to death.
In that manner, the theory goes, the rights of a minority of the states are protected from the depredations of a transient majority—for example, in the 1950s when Southern senators blocked Civil Rights legislation, and, it may be, in 2009 when reactionary conservatives hope to shout down health care reform.
The rule can, however, be changed, as it was in 1974, before which cloture required sixty-seven votes. Perhaps it is time to change the rule to fifty-one votes—a simple Senate majority—and put an end to the tyranny of what Woodrow Wilson described as “a little group of willful men.”
Requiring a larger majority than 51% to begin a vote is in fact helpful, not for the fact that it can halt the process of key bills, but that it prevents a stream of bills being railroaded through without due consideration and opinion from the minority. Perhaps, it would be best to reduce the allowable time a bill can sit on the floor under debate without a vote. Therefore, due consideration is given, the time is taken to prepare arguments from the minority, the public can weigh in, yet the majority, if unshifted, can have its opportunity to place the issue to a vote.
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