The Filibuster and the Trump Senate

Abstract

Abstract The use of the filibuster to delay or obstruct the legislative process in the US Senate reached historic proportions during the Trump administration, marking the continuation of a trend dating to the 1970s. To understand how drastically the US Senate has changed in recent decades, this chapter revisits a notorious period in Senate history, Strom Thurmond’s filibuster of the 1957 Civil Rights bill, which remains the longest one-person speech in Senate history. A comparison of Thurmond’s filibuster to tactics and strategies today show that it is not only changes in Senate rules and norms, but also broader changes in American politics and media, that afford individual Senators powers to obstruct and delay in ways that would have been unimaginable to senators from Thurmond’s era. If Senators of that era had had the tools at their disposal that Senators today have, it is hard to imagine how the landmark civil rights legislation of the mid-twentieth century would have ever come to pass.