 Even if you don't know very much about how Congress works, you've probably heard of the filibuster at least once. It's something everyone who follows politics complains about. It frustrates the majority party in the Senate and it limits what presidents can accomplish. But how does it work? A filibuster happens when a senator decides to stall a bill being considered by the Senate before the Senate can vote on it to make it a law. The Senate can't vote until it finishes the debate on the bill. Basically without a filibuster, if 51 senators vote yes on a bill it passes the Senate. With a filibuster it takes 60. So in a way, one equals nine. It used to be that a senator had to actually talk while they were filibustering. The record for the longest filibuster of continuous talking was set by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina who spent 24 hours and 18 minutes trying to prevent the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1957. Why not 24 hours and 19 minutes? Now a senator just has to show up to stop a bill from passing, though the Senate majority there can require them to actually talk. If 60 senators vote in the debate on a bill, meaning that senators can't speak anymore, then the bill can move forward to the actual vote. This is called a cloture motion. It's French for closure since it closes debate. As you can imagine, these rules mean pretty much no bills passed just by 51 votes. There is a system to allow more than one bill to be considered at the same time so every bill behind the one being filibustered isn't also stopped. Budget bills can be passed through a process called reconciliation, which is not nearly as friendly as the name implies. Reconciliation means the budget bill is only allowed to be debated for 20 hours. One issue with reconciliation is that budget bills often have sections that ban or allow money to be spent on something, which is a lot like a law. So things that look like laws and act like laws but aren't called laws can be passed despite not having enough votes, 60, to stop a filibuster. So basically the Senate is most efficient when it comes to spending money. Big shock. There's also something called a nuclear option, which sounds much cooler than the subject matter deserves. The nuclear option is where the Senate's presiding officer would rule the filibuster unconstitutional as frustrating the requirement of majority rule. Since the Constitution outweighs the Senate's own rules and the filibuster isn't mentioned in the Constitution, this would become the rule until another presiding officer changed it. Decisions by the presiding officer cannot be appealed. Of course to say that this would be unpopular with the minority party would be putting it mildly. One concern about using it to stop even one specific kind of filibuster would be that eventually the majority could change all the rules of the Senate whenever they wanted, which would be a disaster. And so it remains a largely unconsidered option. And there you have the filibuster.