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

The examples at the opening of this chapter notwithstanding, the United States Senate has been referred to as the “world's greatest deliberative body.” Smaller in size than the House of Representatives, with 100 senators as compared to the 435 members of the House, its members are elected for six-year terms. Senators must be older than their House counterparts (at least thirty years old versus twenty-five years old), and senators must have been citizens prior to election for two years longer than their House colleagues (nine years citizenship versus seven years citizenship). The Senate was created by the Founding Fathers as a governing body that would be less directly connected to the mass public than the House of Representatives was—initially, senators were selected by their respective state legislatures—and to represent the interests of their home states in the national government, as compared to members of the House of Representatives, who were and are directly elected by a relatively small subset of each state's population to represent the interests of the citizens. Since ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1913, senators, too, are directly elected by the public. However, the rest of the framers’ constitutional design for the Senate remains largely intact.

At the time it was created, the Senate was unique among “upper” houses because its small number of appointed members had the same amount of authority as the “lower” House of Representatives. The framers believed that the Senate would be a vital check on the House of Representatives that would prevent the House from making hasty, foolhardy decisions. As the Senate's Web site explains: