Glossary on the Republic

Cloture

Union

It is the only standard way to stop a filibuster, and for most of the Senate's history there was no way to stop one at all.

For more than a century, the United States Senate had no mechanism to end debate. If a senator would not yield the floor, business simply stopped. The filibuster was unbreakable.

That changed in 1917. After a small group of senators filibustered a bill to arm American merchant ships as the country edged toward the First World War, an exasperated President Wilson denounced them as a little group of willful men. The Senate, embarrassed, adopted its first cloture rule, a way to cut off debate with a two-thirds vote.

Cloture comes from the French word for closing. Invoking it is the formal motion to close debate and force a final vote. In 1975 the Senate lowered the threshold from two-thirds to three-fifths, which in today's hundred-member Senate means sixty votes.

That number, sixty, is now one of the most important in American politics. It is the practical bar most major legislation must clear, because anything short of it can be talked to death by a determined minority.

Origin

From the French cloture, a closing; the Senate procedure to end debate, first adopted in 1917.

Why it matters

Cloture is the pressure valve the Senate built for itself after realizing endless debate could paralyze the nation in a crisis. It is why a bill can have a majority and still fail, why sixty has become the magic number, and why so much depends on whether one side can find those last few votes to simply end the conversation.