Filibustering in the U.S. Senate By Lauren C. Bell

is sometimes pursued for reasons unrelated to filibustering a particular item of pending business—for example, to bar the possibility of a subsequent filibuster, as a test vote, or to invoke germaneness requirements (Sinclair 2002, 261). In other words, not all filibusters end in cloture votes, and not all cloture votes are taken to end filibusters. As a result, using cloture votes to identify filibusters fails to identify some real filibusters while erroneously suggesting the presence of a filibuster in other cases.

The lack of systematic records of filibustering activity in the Senate has generally hindered the development of serious scholarship of the filibuster. Although recent book-length treatments like Binder and Smith's Politics or Principle (1997), Wawro and Schickler's Filibuster: Obstruction and Lawmaking in the U.S. Senate (2006), and Koger's Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate (2010) attempt to place our understanding of the filibuster on firmer theoretical and empirical foundations, they all suffer from limitations. Schickler and Wawro's study focuses on highly technical aspects of the filibuster, especially the interplay of Senate rules and parliamentary tactics. Although the authors provided some case study analysis, much of their research is heavily quantitative and is simply not accessible to a general audience, or even to most Senate policy or research staff members. Koger's study is important because it is the only one that explores filibusters in the House of Representatives as well as in the Senate. However, his study is also highly theoretical, rendering it vulnerable to the criticism that it does not fully capture the nuances of filibustering in the Senate. On the other hand, Binder and Smith's text is significantly more descriptive in its approach. But, the Binder and Smith study was written using the Beth (1994) filibuster list, which is not only incomplete, but also does not identify the filibuster leader or provide other interesting details, such as categorization of the issue area being filibustered, or the party and majority status of the filibusterers. Thus, they can offer only speculation about individual-level determinants of filibustering and other dynamics (e.g., the decline of bipartisan filibusters in recent congresses).