While passing a piece of legislation requires a simple majority of 51 votes, ending debate requires 60 votes. These 60 votes were only garnered by serious changes to the legislation and huge bribes to a couple of western and southern senators.

Many think this oddly called cloture rule is unconstitutional and not what our founding fathers intended.

Cloture rules which end debate, sometimes called filibuster, are a tool of the minority. They are used to prevent important matters from being decided.

While it is true that the founding fathers did not include the cloture concept in the Constitution, I think they would see it as an important and useful rule. The Constitution was designed to provide checks and balances.

Its intent was to ensure that studious effort went into any decision, and that compromise was achieved. The thought of ramming something through would have been abhorrent to its framers.

The tyranny of the majority was a key concept to Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, the two major intellects behind the Constitution. They understood that for a democracy to succeed, the rights of the minorities had to be protected from the passions of the majority.

In fact, the Senate was set up primarily to ensure this. At the time the Constitution was written there were 13 states. Some like Virginia and New York had large populations. Others like Rhode Island and Vermont did not. The small states needed protection from the large states and a body that equally represented all states

would offset the power of population as represented in the House of Representatives. The Senate was to be another check on the passions of a majority faction.

Okay, so why wasn’t this enough? Why did someone come up with the idea of the filibuster and later the concept of cloture to bring filibusters to an end?

What Madison and Hamilton did not foresee was the ascendency of political parties, at least when they were framing the Constitution. Parties are by definition factions. Their power is their ability to get their members elected and then control them once they are in office. In this country for some reason we have always had two major parties, meaning a majority faction and a minority faction.

Interestingly, when Hamilton started running the government (he was Secretary of the Treasury in Washington’s administration), he did an about-face and created the first faction which ultimately became the Federalist Party. He did this so he could ram his agenda through Congress. Thomas Jefferson, his arch enemy, founded the Democratic-Republicans with James Madison to stymie Hamilton and push his own agenda.

Filibusters came along in the 1840s as a way for the minority to stop the majority from doing what it wanted. The idea of closing off debate, i.e. ending a filibuster, was a new rule added during the Wilson administration. Back then, it took 67 votes to end a debate.

The legislative strategy of using debate to prevent action is as old as this country. It has often been used to prevent or delay very admirable pieces of legislation. One of the most effective filibusters was Senator Robert Byrd from West Virginia using the technique in an attempt to prevent the passage of civil rights legislation by a coalition of northern Republican and Democratic senators.

More recently, when the Senate was controlled by Republicans during the Bush administration, there was a lot of talk about reforming the system of cloture. At that time the minority Democrats were using filibusters to block judicial appointments and prevent an earlier attempt at health care reform known as association-based

health plans.

So pray that we keep the present system. The health care bill that finally passed is a lot better than it would have been without cloture. You may not always get what you want, but this system prevents the tyranny of the majority.