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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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You can wait out a filibuster. You just don’t allow new business until they’re done. That means they have to keep talking and eventually they’ll run out of speaking ability.
A filibuster raises the vote threshold, so it's not something you can just wait out. And thank to how the filibusterer works nowadays, congressmen don't actually need to get up there and talk, they can merely threaten to filibuster to raise the vote threshold.
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/17/1072714887/filibuster-explained
What do you think a filibuster is? It’s an active debate. So yes, you can wait one out. If they can’t continue, then their time is over and you vote. It’s why they’ll get up and read books.
To break it, you don’t move on to new topics until they give up.
That's how it used to work, not anymore:
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/17/1072714887/filibuster-explained
Still work that way. You have three options. You cloture the person, you move to new business or you wait them out. You still have the option to wait. Nothing has changed.
Waiting means nothing happens. You just wait. If it’s important enough that’s what you do.
And that essentially isn't an option at times due to how difficult it is to reach the 60 vote threshold, which means nothing gets done, which means congress is basically useless.
Or you just wait them out. You do nothing until they relent.
Politics sometimes has to be ugly. What you don’t do is make sad excuses as to why things don’t get done. You just shut things down till they go for a vote.
You can't wait out an indefinite filibuster. And it gets to become indefinite because they don't actually need to talk at all.
They’ll get pressure from their party to stop it. At some point they’ll need to move to other business. It’s a battle of the nerves. Politicians have lost the guts to play chicken.
They actually get the opposite, support from their party. Because if you're the minority party and you're able to kill legislation that the majority party wants, it's seen as a victory.