You're listening to Comedy Central.

Let's start with the simplest explanation of the filibuster.

It's basically a loophole in the senate rules for blocking legislation,

because even though you only need 51 votes to possible,

you need 60 votes to stop the debate over voting on that bill in the first place,

which means as long as the minority party can keep debating,

then the bill is basically dead.

And if you're wondering why on earth would the founding fathers put that in the Constitution?

Well, they didn't.

The filibuster began as a historical accident.

It's not some great tradition in the senate that's protected by the Constitution.

It happened in 1805 after Aaron Burke suggested a rules change.

Aaron Burke as vice president in the early 1800s is going over these rules of the senate,

and he made a critical mistake.

He thought, we don't really need a way to stop a debate, do we?

I mean, there's just a few of us.

Like, we will debate until we're done, until everyone's had their say.

How slow could the senate really be?

Nobody knew it at the time.

It'd be three more decades before the first filibuster was actually mounted.

But that was the moment the senate created the filibuster.

That's right.

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