Print edition: 
Republican senators repeatedly have used the threat of a filibuster to stymie health reform and other legislation. Democrats, when they were in the minority, used the threat to prevent confirmation votes on a number of President George W. Bush's judicial nominees.
But filibuster rules are not carved in stone. A Kansas senator helped create the current rules, and there is a lesson in that 1975 change that could help bring reform today.
A filibuster is when one or a few senators try to talk a bill to death. The tactic was most dramatically used by Southern segregationists, all Democrats, against civil rights legislation in the late 1950s and 1960s.
At that time, 66 votes (two-thirds) were required to end debate. Today, 60 votes (three-fifths) are required.
Sen. James B. Pearson, R-Kan., actively helped make that modification happen. Pearson joined Sen. Walter Mondale, D-Minn. to offer a resolution to modify Rule 22, the "cloture" rule that governs how the Senate ends debate.
Pearson and Mondale believed in their institution's tradition of protecting the right of individual senators to speak and vote as they saw fit. But both men also came to believe the overuse of the filibuster had tipped the balance against the will of the majority.
As Pearson put it, there is a time for debate, and there is a time to act.
Mondale and Pearson reminded their colleagues that until 1806 the Senate, like the House of Representatives, had ended debate by simple majorities. They recalled that the existing cloture rule had been put in place during World War I at the urging of President Wilson to expedite legislative action.
In early 1975, the Mondale-Pearson resolution came to the floor for debate. After weeks of maneuvering through motions to table, and motions to recommit, Sen. Russell Long, D-La., came up with a compromise. He proposed that 60 votes be permanently required for cloture, regardless of how many senators were present and voting.
The parliamentarian advised Vice President Nelson Rockefeller that he could deny a motion to reopen a matter already closed and could rule that Rule 22 could be changed by a simple majority. Rockefeller so ruled.
The compromise eventually passed by a vote of 73-21.
The Constitution gives the Senate power to make its own rules. There is a U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the assertion that the Senate can change its rules by a simple majority, but, in fact, everyone knows any attempt to do this can be filibustered.
That is not to say a new compromise, a la Long, could not be carved out and accepted.
In spite of today's hyperpartisanship, respect for the rights of the minority remains strong in the Senate. But considering the frustration with Washington, D.C., being expressed in the electorate today, on the left as well as the right, there seems to be a real prospect that Rule 22 will be revisited soon.
