Excellent article explaining the origin of the filibuster - it has always been tied to the former slaveholding states and opposition to civil rights legislation:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/20/opinion/democrats-filibuster-congress-mcconnell.html
Opinion:
Joe Biden May Have Only Two Years to Get Things Done
Democrats must kill the filibuster and make the Senate great again.
By Adam Jentleson
Mr. Jentleson is the author of
“Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy.”
Jan. 20, 2021
-snip-
The supermajority threshold of today flies in the face of the framers’ intent. They wanted the Senate to be a place where debate was thorough and thoughtful, but limited, and where bills passed or failed on majority votes when it became clear to reasonable minds that debate was exhausted. Originally, Senate rules included a provision allowing a majority to end debate, and an early manual written by Thomas Jefferson established procedures for silencing senators who debated “superfluous, or tediously.” Obstruction was considered beneath them.
The reason the framers set the threshold at a majority is that they wrote the Constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation, which they saw as a disaster because it required a supermajority of Congress to pass most major legislation. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in
Federalist 22, the idea that a supermajority encouraged cooperation had proven deceptive: “What at first sight may seem a remedy, is, in reality, a poison.” Rather than encourage cooperation, he prophesied, the effect of requiring “more than a majority” would be “to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice or artifices” of a minority to the “regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.”
-snip-
The filibuster did not emerge until after the framers died. Its leading innovator was the South Carolinian John C. Calhoun. Seeking to protect slave owners against abolitionism, Calhoun envisioned a Senate where this powerful pro-slavery minority would have not just the voice Madison intended but a veto — or as he put it, “a negative on the others.”
-snip-
The supermajority threshold now associated with the filibuster emerged in the Jim Crow era, when Southern senators used it to stop civil rights (and only civil rights) legislation. In 1917, the Senate created Rule 22 to “terminate successful filibustering,” giving a supermajority (today 60 senators) the ability to bring closure (or “cloture”) to a filibuster. Majority-rule votes remained the norm for all other legislation, but filibustering Southerners made this step of cloture — and its supermajority threshold — the standard for the dozen or so civil rights bills that passed the House and came before the Senate. So although Rule 22 was enacted to bring some constraint to filibusters, it ended up being wielded by Southerners as an effective veto of civil rights legislation.
-snip-
(final paragraph) In his memoir “A Promised Land,” Mr. Obama chronicles his regret that he “hadn’t had the foresight”
to rally Senate Democrats to “to revise the chamber rules and get rid of the filibuster once and for all.” (my bold) Because of his long Senate service, Mr. Biden has unique credibility to lead a successful push for reform. We can’t afford for the Senate to remain the place where good ideas go to die. We need to make the Senate great again.
I highly recommend this article - if you have a subscription, please go read the whole thing.
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