Discussion Groups / English Usage / May 2009

Farhad L.:

 

"Skitt":

Perhaps Farhad does not realize that in the US when the president
nominates someone for the Supreme Court, the Senate must vote to
consent to this choice before the person actually joins the court.
So if there was a filibuster in the Senate, it would delay this
action, exactly as the dictionary had it.

According to Wikipedia (which agrees with my memory), they're not all
that rare:

   Filibusters have become much more common in recent decades. Twice
   as many filibusters took place in the 1991-1992 legislative
   session as took place in the entire nineteenth century.[16] ...

   The filibuster has tremendously increased in frequency of use
   since the 1960s. In the 1960s, no Senate term had more than seven
   filibusters. One of the most notable filibusters of the 1960s was
   when southern Democratic Senators attempted, unsuccessfully, to
   block the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by making a
   filibuster that lasted for 75 hours. In the first decade of the
   21st century, no Senate term had fewer than 49 filibusters. The
   1999-2002 Senate terms both had 58 filibusters.[21] The 110th
   Congress broke the record for filibuster cloture votes reaching
   112 at the end of 2008. [22] [23]

         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster

One of the things that's apparently changed is that you no longer have
to actually speak in order to filibuster; you only have to declare
that you are filibustering.  Apparently the other side can require you
to actually speak, but presumably they don't because they know that
they'd be required to in retaliation when the shoe was on the other
foot.

The U.S. Senate has had cloture (note unusual consonant) for many
years.  The fraction of Senators present required to invoke it has
varied, and there's at least a one-day delay after cloture is invoked
before the matter is brought up again.  (One must remember that the
Senate, like many upper houses, handles nearly all of its routine
business on a unanimous-consent basis.  This includes the motions
necessary to bring a bill up for consideration.)[1]

The House of Representatives has always had time limits on debate, and
most bills with significant opposition are considered under special
rules that restrict amendments, waive points of order, and define how
the time is to be divided.  (An additional confounding factor is that
nearly all floor debate occurs in the grandly named Committee of the
Whole House on the State of the Union; rules generally provide that
when the Committee of the Whole rises, no further amendments are
permitted before the House votes on passage.)

-GAWollman

[1] Query: in Westminster, what happens if the House of Lords fails to
take up a bill passed by the Commons?  Is it treated for Parliament
Acts purposes the same as if the upper house actually voted the
measure down?

The latter, although that's not quite how the OED describes it:

 2. a. One of a class of piratical adventurers who pillaged the
       Spanish colonies in the West Indies during the 17th c.

That's cited to 1792.  There's a second subsense of

    b. A member of any of those bands of adventurers who between 1850
       and 1860 organized expeditions from the United States, in
       violation of international law, for the purpose of
       revolutionizing certain states in Central America and the
       Spanish West Indies.

cited to 1854, but the legislative sense (as a verb) of

 2. To obstruct progress in a legislative assembly; to practise
    obstruction.

is cited to 1853, so both the extension and the transferred sense
appear to have happened at about the same time.

I did come across a slight antedating for the legislative sense:

   [Attn Jesse Sheidlower: OED antedating]

   Mr. CARTTER.  I am ready to acquiesce in any reasonable humbug for
   the benefit of the West, [laughter,] any plausible humbug; but
   when you come to talk about light-houses upon the Ohio river I am
   ready to filibuster.

                          _The Congressional Globe, 8/4/1852

There are also antedatings for the "excursion sense", though without
looking closely at them, I'm not sure which ones are talking about the
earlier sense and which an extended sense.

There also appears to be a somewhat earlier medical sense.  I was
surprised to see

   The picture-book that seems to have been our first, was about one
   Mr.  Filibuster (in the medical profession, we presume, from the
   name),

But then I started to see things like

   We never cured a case of prolapsus by the pessary, or of
   long-standing leucorroea, connected with inflammatory or
   ulcerative disease of the cervix, by constitutional treatment and
   the ordinary local appliances.
      Such _fillibustering_ [sic] may succeed in recent and trivial
   cases, but when the disease is more strongly intrenched, it can
   only be dislodged by a superior force operating directly and
   systematically upon it.

                   _Ohio Medical and Surgical Journal_, July, 1853