What are your thoughts on the U.S. Senate Filibuster? - non-American opinions welcome too

[Account]

For Non-Americans: The filibuster in the U.S. Senate effectively requires most normal laws to have 60% of the Senate to pass, instead of 51%. The Senate is made up of two senators each from each of the 50 U.S. states, regardless of population. The filibuster doesn't apply to positions that the President appoints, budget reconciliation (a process that can only happen once a year), and other random stuff like national emergencies. The filibuster can be removed from a type of law by invoking the nuclear option, which itself only requires 51% of the Senate due to a loophole in how the rules of the Senate work.

The current government shutdown is because the bill to fund the government does not have 60% of the Senate voting for it. It has more than 50% of the votes of the Senate, however, and the government shutdown would not have occurred if the filibuster did not exist. (The reconciliation process was used to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill a few months ago, so reconciliation cannot be used to fund the government at this time.)

What are your thoughts on the filibuster? I used to be for it but now I am more against it than for it. It makes Congress even more useless than normal, and the void of Congress's lack of action is being filled with Presidential executive orders and Supreme Court precedent in recent years. It also causes legal bullshittery like stuffing everything into budget bills because those can get through the budget reconciliation process.

 

[LaxerBRO]

Make it a speaking filibuster and a quorum of Senators need to be in the chamber to keep the filibuster going.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

The US government is an ontologically aggressive entity, and filibuster and cloture (that's the 60% / three-fifths thingy you're referring to) are ethically inert mechanisms within that coercive framework. Given that, they are only significant in whether they happen to increase or decrease the speed of aggressive acts. However, any momentary good that comes from them is pragmatic and not principled.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I thought it will be about the thing where senators can do a speech to delay votes, with famous cases of senators reading phonebooks for several hours.

Anyways 60% is not a ridiculous percentage, but the question if 2 party system make it so the senate can't do shit in practice

 

[Drag-on Knight 91873]

I came in because I thought it was asking about the value of the Senate. Congress is the most useless part of the government. They're not actually accountable--every time I send letters, I just get form letters back and stuck on a mailing list--they actually ceded its authority to declare war, the most important power they had, and it's the most corrupt of the branches because that corruption is legal.

Anyways, that the US often paralyzes itself looks very dumb to outsiders and it's annoying theater in practice. No one is ballsy enough to go all the way and shut it down. It just means that government employees miss one paycheck, not that the government collapses.

 

[Geddy Lee's Fee and See]

I just see it as proof that the government of the US is devolving and will be replaced with something worse within my lifetime. Not because of this one incident, but due to the increasing frequency of said incidents amd the inability of Congress to do something genuinely positive for the citizens of the United States.