Filibuster Quotes

#1. O, Senator, drop your trousers! Loosen your cravat! Eschew your spats and step into that shallow, teeming world of mayflies and dragonflies and frogs' eyes staring eye-to-eye with your own, and the silty bottom. Cease your filibuster against the world God gave you.

Paul Harding

#2. They say that women talk too much. If you have worked in Congress you know that the filibuster was invented by men.

Clare Boothe Luce

#3. The argument most commonly made in the filibuster's favor is crudely partisan: 'Our side may be in the majority now, but someday it will be in the minority, and when that happens we'll want to block the other side's extremist agenda.'

Timothy Noah

#4. To be honest, I haven't seen much serious budget planning since the Republicans took control of the House after the 2010 elections and grabbed onto the Senate filibuster. It's not the White House's fault that John Boehner couldn't deliver on a bigger deal.

Gail Collins

#5. Filibuster has long tradition, but used to harm civil rights.

Barack Obama

#6. You know, the purpose of reconciliation is to avoid the filibuster. The filibuster is an effort to talk something to death.

Dick Durbin

#7. We've seen filibusters of bills and nominations that ultimately passed with 90 or more votes. Why filibuster something that has that kind of support? Just to slow down the process and keep the Senate from working.

Elizabeth Warren

#8. Filibusters should require 35 senators to ... make a commitment to continually debate an issue in reality, not just in theory. The number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster should be reduced to 55 from 60.

Evan Bayh

#9. I mean, if you go back to 1960 on major pieces of legislation, the filibuster was used about eight percent of the time.

Tom Udall

#10. I would never filibuster any President's judicial nominee, period. I might vote against them, but I will always see they came to a vote.

Saxby Chambliss

#11. We demand that segregation be ended in every school district in the year 1963! We demand that we have effective civil rights legislation - no compromise, no filibuster - and that include public accommodations, decent housing, integrated education, FEPC and the right to vote.

Bayard Rustin

#12. Healthy debate has been replaced by automatic sensors that eliminate the need for actual talking during a filibuster - a la 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.' Robust debate is necessary in a democratic society. Instead, our discourse has been relegated to media spin by expert entertainers.

Douglas Wilder

#13. There is no Senate rule governing the proper uses of the filibuster.

Tony Snow

#14. It used to be in the Senate that if you were filibustering, you stood up. There was a physical dimension to it, that you - when you became exhausted you would have to leave the floor. That was the idea of the filibuster.

Tom Udall

#15. The House of Representatives eliminated the filibuster way back in the 19th century, and somehow it managed to survive.

Timothy Noah

#16. We've seen filibusters to block judicial nominations, jobs bills, political transparency, ending Big Oil subsidies - you name it, there's been a filibuster.

Elizabeth Warren

#17. When you use the word 'filibuster,' most of us in America - and I count myself among them - envision it as the ability to hold the floor on rare occasions to speak at length and make your point emphatically and even delay progress by taking hours.

Jeff Merkley

#18. There are two ways of looking at the talking filibuster. My way is as a form of unanimous consent.

Jeff Merkley

#19. Voter suppression laws, overzealous filibuster use, you name it - the Republicans use every tactic they can to stop our democracy from actually selecting the person with the most support.

Jennifer Granholm

#20. My way of viewing the talking filibuster was as a way of doing unanimous consent with your feet. You object by going down and talking.

Jeff Merkley

#21. The filibuster is an affront to commonly understood democratic norms, but then so is the Senate.

Hendrik Hertzberg

#22. So I put that all together and I find it makes it hard to justify a filibuster.

Kent Conrad

#23. When I became president with a commitment to reform health care, Hillary was a natural to head the health care task force. You all know we failed because we couldn't break a Senate filibuster. Hillary immediately went to work on solving the problems the bill sought to address one by one.

William J. Clinton

#24. Filibusters have proliferated because under current rules just one or two determined senators can stop the Senate from functioning. Today, the mere threat of a filibuster is enough to stop a vote; senators are rarely asked to pull all-nighters like Jimmy Stewart in 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.'

Evan Bayh

#25. No one likes the Electoral College, expect perhaps those who were elected because of it. No one likes gerrymandering, except those doing the gerrymandering. No one likes the filibuster, except those doing the filibustering.

Kevin Bleyer

#26. My view of the filibuster is either you've got to lower vote edge or make people really filibuster if they feel that seriously about a piece of legislation.

Angus King

#27. We shouldn't deny the right of the minority to filibuster, but we need to do a much better job of making them own it. That way, the American people could figure out who is being obstructionist and who is willing to compromise.

Claire McCaskill

#28. In the first 50 years of the filibuster, it was used only 35 times. But the last Congress alone had 112 cloture motions filed, plus threats of more. This is the tyranny of the minority.

Peter Fenn

#29. It seems as though there are Members in this body who want to filibuster just about everything we try to do, whether it is stopping judicial nominations, the Energy bill, or this Medicare bill.

Jim Bunning

#30. President Barack Obama has it right - there is a lot to change about Washington. The problem is, not much will get changed unless we confront the runaway filibuster in the U.S. Senate.

Peter Fenn