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What's the deal with the filibuster? This is a voyage that starts with pirates in the Caribbean. A real ones. How's that for a hook? So the filibuster is a tool that senators can use to stop a bill from passing. But before we get into what exactly that means we've got to talk about how the chamber votes in order for Bill to sail through the Senate, just a simple majority. 51 out of 100 senators have to say hi. Before they could go to the bill itself, though, senators debated. Then they vote on whether to stop debate and actually vote on the bill. At least 60 have to agree to that. This is called Cluster. If a senator doesn't even want to risk having a vote on a bill because they don't want it to pass, they can filibuster talking for so long that they rob the Senate of working on anything else. Some have read the phone book. Dr Seuss even sang songs to make it happen, pirating the legislative process. Now, once they start that course, the goal is to get as many other folks in their side to try and stop the Senate for moving forward with the bill, A change in the rules back in the 19 seventies. Allowing the Senate toe work on multiple things at once means they don't do those long speeches quite as much anymore. Just the threat can get a bill pushed off to the side long enough that it essentially walks the plane plunging into the ocean of dead legislation. If this sounds like a waste of time, it ISS it's kind of the point. Although it didn't start off that way, the filibuster is a tool that the Senate stumbled upon essentially back in the 18 hundreds. It was to support debate in what's considered the higher minded Chamber of Congress, some saying that it forces bipartisanship. Now it's used by the party that's not empowered to have a bit more sway. But the filibuster can't block everything. Bills that mainly affect taxes and spending can go a reconciliation process and can't be filibustered. Then there is the nuclear option. It lets the majority party blow up the filibuster and that 60 vote requirement in certain situations. Now, so far, it's only been used to confirm federal judges, Supreme Court justices, Cabinet secretaries Oh, almost forgot the whole pirate connection. So the term filibuster comes from a mix of Dutch, French and Spanish words that mean pirate eventually became used to describe people who encouraged revolutions in the Caribbean considered obstructionist, and a couple of decades later it became the practice of obstructing to block a vote in the Senate, and that is the deal to filibuster.