whats a filibuster?

[Rogmok]

can someone explain to me what a filibuster is?? in terms of our gov't.

[princess]

eeek im having flashbacks to government class. :blink:

[Tao]

a filabuster is when a congressman literally "talks a bill to death", meaning that when the floor is open to any comments or debates, the politician that is against the bill, will keep on talking for at least a couple of hours. I beleive the record for filabustering is like 2 days or something.

there's no time limit for a filabuster in the senate, but in the house it's around 1.5 hours, so congressmen in the house would take turns in a tag team sorta method.

however there's also a way to stop the filabuster, if the house or senate can have enough votes to stop it. I forgot the term for it, i'm sure others here would know.

[VV o n g B a]

i'm sure someone can explain it better. but basically it's a delaying motion. any legislation up for vote has to be passed within a certain time period. if the ppl against the bill know they can't win a straightup vote, sometimes they'll talk the issue to death. ppl are allotted a certain amount of time to argue the bill. if the speaker(s) decide to refuse to let someone bring up a motion to vote for the bill and the voting period has passed, then the bill fails without a vote.

filibusters can be broken if enuf ppl who want to vote on the bill will make a motion to cut the speaker's time.

[Hiroshi2]

Originally posted by Tao@Jun 27 2003, 11:33 AM
a filabuster is when a congressman literally "talks a bill to death", meaning that when the floor is open to any comments or debates, the politician that is against the bill, will keep on talking for at least a couple of hours. I beleive the record for filabustering is like 2 days or something.

The record for a fillibuster was held by Strom Thurmond (24 hours) who died last night actually.

[Emperor_Mike]

Originally posted by VV o n g B a@Jun 27 2003, 08:33 AM
i'm sure someone can explain it better. but basically it's a delaying motion. any legislation up for vote has to be passed within a certain time period. if the ppl against the bill know they can't win a straightup vote, sometimes they'll talk the issue to death. ppl are allotted a certain amount of time to argue the bill. if the speaker(s) decide to refuse to let someone bring up a motion to vote for the bill and the voting period has passed, then the bill fails without a vote.

filibusters can be broken if enuf ppl who want to vote on the bill will make a motion to cut the speaker's time.
That's right. A filibuster is nothing more than a delay tactic. You can look it up on dictionary.com. Strom Thurmond holds the record for the longest filibuster in US Senate history at 24hrs 18mins before a physician had to drag him away.

[VV o n g B a]

Originally posted by Hiroshi2@Jun 27 2003, 11:39 AM
Originally posted by Tao@Jun 27 2003, 11:33 AM
a filabuster is when a congressman literally "talks a bill to death", meaning that when the floor is open to any comments or debates, the politician that is against the bill, will keep on talking for at least a couple of hours. I beleive the record for filabustering is like 2 days or something.

The record for a fillibuster was held by Strom Thurmond (24 hours) who died last night actually.
ppl have used the time up by reading the names and numbers from telephone books when they knew they were in it for the long haul.

[Tao]

strom died! wow....finally

[YuheiCarreau]

The House of Representatives, the lower house of the US Congress, has upwards of 400 members (which grows according to population growth). Because of this, the House has a lot of rules, including some regulating how long a Representative may speak on a given issue.

The Senate, on the other hand, has only 100 members (and the population of senators will always be limited to 2 times the number of existing states); because of this, the Senate is much more informal than the House, and does not have rules explicitly limiting the amount of time a Senator may speak. The Senate ony meets for a limited time (the House too), so if a Senator from Nebraska finds out that some other Senators will be proposing legislation that changes the amount of money Nebraska gets in federal funding, he may decide to get up before those Senators and speak all the way through to the end of the Senate session. This is called a filibuster, and is usually accomplished by Senators reading cookbooks, phonebooks, and a whole lotta other crap for days on end.

[lethal]

Originally posted by Tao@Jun 27 2003, 12:33 PM
however there's also a way to stop the filabuster, if the house or senate can have enough votes to stop it. I forgot the term for it, i'm sure others here would know.
Supermajority. In the Senate, it is 60 votes. Not sure about the house.

That's why you hear about "filibusterproof majorities" during certain election cycles.