These 100 people are the US senate.
They pass laws.
They vote, and when a majority says yes, it passes.
But these days, the senate doesn't do that very often.
See, the senate has this rule.
It says before they vote, 60 people have to agree to have the vote.
That means just 41 people, a minority, can entirely block a bill.
This is called a filibuster.
Early on, filibusters were rare.
This is a chart of the number of times the senate has had to vote to break a filibuster
in the last hundred years.
But in the last 50 years, they started to grow.
And now, almost every big bill is filibustered.
The US senate is broken.
And the filibuster broke it.
But the senate didn't always have this rule.
In fact, it all kind of happened by accident.
This is the senate in 1805.
It's much smaller than it is now.
And the filibuster, as we know it today, doesn't exist yet.
And before they vote on a bill, they debate.
If they want to end debate and vote, they just need a majority to agree.
But Vice President Aaron Burr thinks a high-minded place like the senate should have
as much debate as needed.
So the senate gets rid of the rule.
Now, senators can debate for as long as they want — and there is no way to stop them.
This is the beginning of the senate filibuster.
At first, it isn't really a problem.
Because the senate is still pretty small, there is only so long a group of senators
can physically talk.
Eventually, they tire out.
Debate ends.
And they get to a vote.
But as the US grows, so does the senate.
And they have more factions, and more people to filibuster bills.
They move to a bigger room.
And now it's 1917.
World War I is underway, but the US isn't involved.
Then-President Woodrow Wilson asks Congress to authorize a broad military action
A group of senators don't want to give Wilson the power to enter the war.
So they decide to debate until the session ends.
Filibuster.
Woodrow Wilson is mad — and he demands that they go back to the old senate rules — that
debate can be ended with a simple majority.
The senate doesn't want to do that.
So instead, they compromise.
They change the rules so they can end debate with the approval of 2/3rd of the senate.
So that if senators want to block a bill, they need 1/3rd to do it.
This is basically the system we have today — a supermajority to agree to vote, then
a simple majority to pass a law.
And for a few decades the filibuster is used, but pretty sparingly.
Then in the 1950s, the senate starts to consider civil rights legislation — and southern
senators really hate this.
But they don't have to votes to actually defeat the bills.
So they start using the filibuster to block bills.
Here's South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond.
He looks tired, because he just filibustered the 1957 Civil Rights Act — for more than
24 hours.
These filibusters are painstaking — and they block the senate from actually doing work.
The majority leader at the time, Mike Mansfield, doesn't like this.
He’s okay with needing a supermajority to pass things.
What he doesn’t like are these long, pointless speeches.
So he makes a change.
He skips the debate -- and goes directly to a vote to see if there's a supermajority to
end debate.
This means, if senators wants to filibuster, they don't have to stand up and talk.
They can just threaten to — as long as they have the numbers to block a supermajority vote.
This makes it way easier to filibuster.
And the number of filibusters grows.
In the mid-70s, the Senate changes the threshold needed to filibuster -- now instead of 34
senators, you need 41.
But it doesn't make much of a difference.
And then around the 2000s, senators in the minority start to realize something:
So they filibuster everything the other party wants to do.
That's what leads to this spike.
Now almost every big bill is filibustered.
Finally, in 2013, the Democratic majority makes a change to the rules, that says the
filibuster no longer applies to certain confirmation votes.
In 2017, the Republican majority makes another, similar change.
Both times, it feels like a huge deal.
But now things are beginning to change.
The 2020 elections are coming up.
And Democrats have some big proposals.
"Health care in America."
"Federal investment in teacher's salaries."
"Investments in clean energy."
But Democrats know, even if they get a majority in the Senate, they're not going
to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.
And that's why a new idea is now on the table.
"Would you urge the senate democratic leader to get rid of the filibuster?"
"I think we have to have that on the table."
"Get rid of the filibuster."
Getting rid of an old tradition naturally feels radical.
But here’s one more story about the filibuster.
The senate is only one half of Congress.
The other half, the House of Representatives, also used to have rules that allowed the minority
party to filibuster bills.
Then, in 1888, Republicans won control of the House.
But the filibuster rules kept them from actually passing anything.
It was like the election, and ultimately the will of the people, didn't even matter.
So they got rid of it.
And the reasoning was pretty simple.
If the party that loses an election can block the winners from doing anything...
What does it mean to be a democracy?