Jimmy Stewart filibusters in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington"
The perennial debate over the wisdom of the Senate’s filibuster rule has resumed in recent weeks, spotlighted by President Obama’s efforts to corral the sixty votes needed to move his legislative agenda through the Senate. The contours of the debate are now familiar. Critics argue that the filibuster exacerbates the already anti-majoritarian character of the Senate, allowing a small minority to obstruct popular legislation. Defenders of the filibuster argue that it provides an important check on the power of the majority to enact its agenda without a broad base of support.
Thinking about this debate last week, I started to wonder just how anti-majoritarian modern Senate filibusters are. Oddly, I don’t think this has been addressed in the political science literature (if it has, please let me know). So I wrote a simple computer program to calculate the fraction of the national population represented by the proponents and opponents of all the failed cloture motions over the past ten years. The results are interesting: they suggest that you can’t really talk about the democratic significance of the filibuster without asking who’s doing the filibustering.
