LETTER: Filibuster isn’t even in the Constitution
Nice try, Michael Ramirez. “Eliminating the Senate filibuster will transform the traditional role of a deliberative Senate into the reactive role of a smaller House of Representatives” was Mr. Ramirez’s tagline for his March 22 editorial cartoon. The accompanying illustration showed the Senate without the filibuster portrayed as Neanderthal.
But nowhere in the Constitution does the use of the filibuster appear. In fact, my understanding is that the filibuster was never, or extremely rarely, used until the 1850s.
That means that such Senate luminaries as Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Robert LaFollette, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Edward Kennedy — all lions of the Senate — operated with a filibuster nowhere to be found.