Power / Explainer

How Did the Senate End Up With Supermajority Gridlock?

The Constitution meant for Congress to pass bills by a simple majority. But the process has changed over the decades.

by Lindsay M. Chervinsky via Governing on October 13, 2021

...motivations and lead with more long-term vision. First, senators would fill six-year terms, so they were less likely to be voted out of office for one potentially unpopular decision. Second, the framers arranged for state legislators to select their senators, rather than untrustworthy voters.

Despite the framers’ expectations that the Senate would be the more cautious body, they did not intend for it to prevent all legislation. In “Federalist No. 10,” James Madison pondered the influence of faction and insists on the right of majority rule: “Relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote.”

So, the framers intended for a majority vote to secure the passage of legislation. Then how did we get to where we are now? The process began, inadvertently, in 1805, when Vice President Aaron Burr made a suggested change to the rules. The Senate rule book was an ongoing project and often quite repetitive. At the time, senators utilized several provisions to end debate and proceed to a vote. Burr suggested that they remove the rule that allowed a simple majority vote to end debate, since the senators rarely used it anyway. The senators agreed.

Although this rule change opened the door for the filibuster, no one employed this new measure until 1837, when a group of Whig senators held the floor to prevent Andrew Jackson’s allies from expunging his censure from the Senate record. Over the next decade, John C. Calhoun made the filibuster famous, by routinely using the “talking filibuster” to obstruct measures that attacked the economic and political influence of the South.

Filibusters increased in frequency over the course of the 19th century until 1917, when the Senate adopted a new rule that “allowed the Senate to invoke cloture.” Under this new rule, the Senate could end debate with a two-thirds supermajority and move onto the official vote on the proposed legislation.

While President Woodrow Wilson first advocated the use of cloture to force the Senate to pass key defensive measures during World War I, segregationists seized upon this legislative tool to protect their worldview just a few years later. They turned the cloture vote into a vote on the legislation itself, rather than just a vote to end debate. As a result, legislation that once required 51 votes to pass now took 66. In 1975, the Senate passed a revision reducing the cloture rule to a three-fifths supermajority, or 60 votes, to override the filibuster, instead of the original two-third limit.