Long-Winded Senate Tradition

WASHINGTON — Thanks to the ever-popular "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," most Americans have one enduring image of the U.S. Senate: a place where even rookie lawmakers can filibuster a bill to death by talking for hours, days -- or as long as their legs can hold up.

However, that 1939 movie image is as relevant to today's Senate as the LP is to modern music recording.

The filibuster -- the storied Senate tradition of blocking a bill by talking around the clock -- is hardly ever conducted the old-fashioned way.

Beginning this evening, Senate Republicans plan to invoke the spirit of that tradition by forcing Democrats to talk through the night to sustain their filibuster of several controversial judicial nominations.

But no one expects the staged 30-hour talkathon to break the yearlong deadlock over judges, and Republicans admit the event is more a public relations effort to spotlight an obscure issue than a realistic drive to break the opposition.

The fanfare that has gone into holding the Senate in an all-night session, the outcome of which is preordained, underscores just how marginal the old-style filibuster has become.

Long gone are the days when the filibuster was deployed mostly for issues of great national significance such as civil rights and war, with senators holding the floor by reciting recipes, reading from the Bible and devising ways to avoid trips to the bathroom.

Such spectacles have become a rarity in part because of the growth of federal social programs since President Johnson's Great Society of the mid-1960s. With more and more legislation demanding their attention, congressional leaders have been less willing to let the Senate get tied up on a single issue.

That is one reason Senate leaders devised a technique in the mid-1970s for keeping filibusters from bringing the work of the chamber to a halt: When someone threatens a filibuster, leaders simply move on to other business. The result has been fewer full-blown filibusters but more filibuster threats: Senators freely warn they will filibuster a bill, safe in the assumption that leaders will not force them to pull an all-nighter.

Some analysts say the demise of the genuine filibuster also reflects a broader decline in the quality of Senate debate in an era of sound-bite politics.

"The sound bite is the enemy of sustained argument," said Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University. "I don't think the kind of oratorical cut and thrust that used to be so characteristic of the Senate occurs anymore."