Demise of the filibuster rule would be felt by farmers and rural America BY BROOKE APPLETON Vice President of Public Policy, National Corn Growers Association When people ask what worries me most about the political divisions in Congress, I tell them that one of my biggest concerns is the Senate eliminating the filibuster. That’s not only because it would do away with an important tool that encourages bipartisanship, but also because the demise of this practice, which allows for extended debate that prevents legislation from advancing without a 60-vote threshold, could have serious ramifications for farm policy. While the filibuster’s downfall is not as imminent as some would like, thanks to Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), it is perhaps closer to being eliminated than at any other time in American history. And while many see eliminating the Senate filibuster as the means to an important end, including passing voting rights legislation, climate policy and circumventing stagnation from a hyper-partisan
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political climate, I would caution these advocates to consider all that would be lost if the filibuster were no longer part of the Senate rules. I would also remind them that the filibuster has been used for over two centuries precisely because it serves the important purpose of making the Senate more deliberative. Though the filibuster is not mentioned specifically in the constitution, long debate aimed at shaping or derailing legislation goes back to the earliest days of the Senate. As the practice became more common toward the mid-19th Century, when the process acquired the name filibuster, many began calling for a rule that would allow the Senate to formally end debate and move legislation to a vote. In 1917, the Senate added a rule that called for a two-thirds vote of the Senate to end debate, often referred to as cloture. In the 1970s, the Senate lowered the number of votes needed to end debate to threefifths (60 votes) of the Senate. The filibuster faced one of its biggest existential crises in 2013, when Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), then the Senate Majority Leader, ended the use of the filibuster on presidential appointments. In 2017, when Republicans regained control of the Senate,
