Ezra Klein: The Move to Reform the Filibuster: The New Yorker ABSTRACT:THE POLITICAL SCENE about the filibuster, and the various plans for reforming it. A key promise of President Barack Obama's first term was to pass the DREAM Act, which would grant the foreign-born children of undocumented immigrants a path to permanent-resident status if they had attended college or served in the U.S. military. On December 8, 2010, the House of Representatives passed the bill. The next day, it came up in the Senate, where, among the hundred members of the chamber, it garnered fifty-nine "aye" votes - a clear majority. But the bill didn't pass. It was filibustered before it could reach the President's desk. No President in American history has seen his initiatives filibustered with anything even approaching the frequency with which the tactic has been used against Obama. But it wasn't until this past December that the practice truly reached its apotheosis: the self-filibuster, which Mitch McConnell, the Republican Minority Leader in the Senate, used to derail a piece of legislation that he had proposed, after he realized that its passage might be favorable to the Democrats. "I've got whiplash," said Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from Missouri. In today's Senate, filibusters are common and disruptive. There are several proposals to reform the filibuster. Describes the proposals, some of which have been suggested by new senators (Jeff Merkley, Tom Udall), and some of which have been suggested by Senate veterans (John McCain, Harry Reid). Tells about the history of the filibuster: the Founders never intended it, and it has been modified repeatedly since its inception. Originally, the filibuster wasn't called by that name; the term, derived from the Dutch word for "pirate," didn't come into vogue until the eighteen-fifties. Relates several anecdotes - some of them quite humorous - about historical filibusters. Describes the uses of the filibuster: in the nineteen-thirties and forties, the filibuster was most aggressively and publicly used to foil anti-lynching legislation, anti-poll-tax measures, and the creation of the Fair Employment Practices Commission. Breaking the filibuster thus became a top priority of the civil-rights movement and its Senate allies. Describes the mechanics of a modern-day filibuster. Even if sixty votes can be mustered to defeat a filibuster, it takes a lot of time to get them. A single bill can be filibustered some half a dozen times. You can filibuster the motion to proceed to a bill. Then you can filibuster the effort to amend the bill. Then you can filibuster the vote on the bill. Then, there's the motion to go to conference with the House on the bill - that's also open to a filibuster. Every step of the process can have its own filibuster, with its own two days to vote to break that filibuster, and its own thirty hours of post-filibuster debate. There's no perfect measure of how frequently filibusters occur. The closest thing we have to a count is the number of cloture votes the majority mounts. From 1917 to 1970, the majority sought cloture fifty-eight times. Since the start of President Obama's first term, it has sought cloture more than two hundred and fifty times.