Aaron Burr Accidentally Invented the Filibuster
On his way out of office in 1805, Burr told the Senate to tidy its rulebook. They cut the wrong rule.
In his farewell address to the Senate on March 2, 1805, Vice President Aaron Burr suggested the chamber clean up its rulebook. One rule he flagged as redundant was the "previous question" motion, a parliamentary tool the House still uses to cut off debate by majority vote. The Senate had barely used it. The next year, senators struck it from their rules.
Nobody at the time thought they were doing anything dramatic. The motion was tidied away as housekeeping. But by removing the only existing mechanism to force a vote, the Senate quietly left itself with no way to end debate at all. A single senator could now, in principle, talk a bill to death.
For decades that loophole sat dormant. The first real filibuster did not come until 1837, three decades after Burr's tidy-up, when a minority blocked a resolution to expunge a censure of Andrew Jackson. The tactic spread. The Senate did not give itself a way to stop debate again until 1917, when President Wilson, furious that a small group had killed his bill to arm merchant ships, pushed through Rule XXII and its two-thirds cloture threshold. The bar dropped to three-fifths in 1975.
The upshot is that the most powerful procedural weapon in American politics exists because a departing vice president, on his way out the door after killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel the previous summer, recommended a janitorial edit.
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