U.S. Senator Rand Paul, with some help from his friends, completed a 10 ½-hour talk on the Senate floor late Wednesday night. So how does Paul’s latest effort compare to other extended oratory in the Senate?
Paul, the junior Senator from Kentucky, is obviously upset about proposals to extend the ability of the NSA to collect the phone records of American citizens. Senators Mike Lee, Ted Cruz and Ron Wyden spelled Paul during his marathon talk.
“I will not let the PATRIOT Act — the most unpatriotic of acts — go unchallenged,” Paul said at the start of this speech.
It is uncertain that Paul’s effort will go into the Senate record books as a filibuster, because he stopped talking before 11:59 p.m., and he didn’t technically delay a Senate vote.
“The witching hour was midnight; if Mr. Paul could talk into Thursday, he could briefly delay a key procedural vote on a major trade bill, at which point his speech would become an official filibuster. More important, he could push back when the Senate can take up the U.S.A. Freedom Act, preventing lawmakers from heading home for the Memorial Day weekend,” the New York Times’ Ashley Parker said in her day-after analysis.
But the Washington Post raised a few good points about why Paul’s speech could be considered a filibuster.
“Paul himself is calling his speech a filibuster, and with good reason: If he keeps talking long enough, he can upend Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s carefully laid plans for the week, prevent amendments to the trade bill, delay consideration of the surveillance legislation, and otherwise prevent his Senate colleagues from enjoying their holiday weekends,” said Mike DeBonis.
And while Paul quit before midnight on Wednesday, Senate records show McConnell filed his cloture motion just after 9 a.m. on Thursday. (Ultimately, the Senate Historian's office could decide the issue.)
Among Senators to launch a really long talk recently on the Senate floor was Ted Cruz, who spoke for more than 21 hours in September 2013 and technically didn’t meet the official filibuster criteria because he didn’t delay a vote.
Paul also spoke in March 2013 in what was considered a filibuster. He protested John Brennan’s nomination as CIA director and the use of drones by the government. The 2013 filibuster lasted almost 13 hours and Cruz, Lee and Wyden also took part in the effort.
In general, talking filibusters are rare in modern times. The Senate currently uses a “silent” filibuster system where a member threatens to filibuster. A cloture vote is then required, with a 60-vote majority, to override the filibuster and limit debate time.
Link: Fun filibuster factoids
The last major talking filibuster in the Senate before Paul’s 2013 effort was in December 2010, when Senator Bernie Sanders spoke for more than eight hours to protest a tax law. That was the longest filibuster since 1992.
The House of Representatives doesn’t use filibusters anymore. When the House got bigger, it moved away from filibusters in 1842.
In its original form, a senator can “grab” the Senate floor and stall a bill by speaking for as long as he or she could stay conscious. The scene with Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is a famous example of a talking filibuster, where Smith’s character collapses after a 24-hour filibuster in the 1939 film.
A famous real-life filibuster involved Senator Strom Thurmond, who held the Senate floor for 24 hours in an attempt to block the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
According to the Senate website, a group of senators also staged a tag-team 57-day filibuster to protest the Civil Rights Act of 1964, until a successful cloture vote shut down the filibuster.
Filibusters and similar tactics aren’t new in the world of politics. One of the first recorded masters of the filibusters was the ancient Roman politician Cato the Younger.
In Rome’s senate, Cato would speak until sunset, which was the official ending of a Senate session. One of his last filibusters was to oppose Julius Caesar’s return to Rome in 60 B.C.
