Data Shows Senate Hasn’t Always Relied on Cloture to Pass Legislation
Senators Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Rick Scott, R-Fla., have urged their colleagues - and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D. - to use the Senate’s existing rules to overcome Democrats’ obstruction and pass the SAVE America Act. Lee recently made the case to Thune on X. “As I’ve been asking you to do for months, please bring it up now and announce that we will debate it until it passes.”
Thune rejected the proposal. “Sometimes when something hasn’t been done in 100 years,” he replied, “there’s a reason for that.” The majority leader has repeatedly argued that the bill’s proponents are “creating false expectations” by promoting an unworkable strategy. According to Thune, the Senate has never passed legislation this way - “it’s never been done, or at least hasn’t been done in modern history.”
The implication of Thune’s argument is straightforward. The Senate can end debate and pass legislation in only two ways: by unanimous consent or by invoking cloture.
In the first method - unanimous consent - any senator can block legislation simply by objecting to a request to pass a bill or proceed to a final vote. No senator has to hold the floor, debate at length, or prevail in a vote. A single "I object" is enough to prevent the Senate from acting. Consequently, unanimous consent works only when no senator objects, making it useful primarily for broadly bipartisan measures.
That leaves cloture. Cloture empowers a supermajority of senators to end debate and proceed to a final up-or-down vote on the underlying question, even if some senators want to keep talking. But the historical record does not support Thune's implicit claim that cloture has been the Senate's exclusive means of overcoming obstruction - ending debate - and passing legislation. The data demonstrates instead that the Senate’s present dependence on cloture is not a century-old tradition. It is a relatively recent development.
Cloture Use Over Time
The Senate established the cloture process - Rule XXII - in 1917. The new rule created a procedure by which a supermajority could end debate and proceed to a final passage vote. Before then, senators had no formal mechanism to cut off debate when senators wanted to keep talking. They had to use other provisions in the Senate’s rulebook to wear them down. Yet the Senate still enacted tariffs, chartered and regulated national banks, appropriated money, and passed other significant legislation. In every case, senators debated until the debate ended. Then they voted.
The Senate’s adoption of Rule XXII did not suddenly transform how it considered legislation on the floor. Cloture remained an extraordinary tool - available but rarely used - for decades. Between 1917 and 1962, the Senate invoked cloture only five times. During that same period, it passed legislation establishing Social Security, the Wagner Act, the Marshall Plan, and numerous other bills that would become landmark laws. Because cloture required a two-thirds vote at the time - a threshold that majorities could rarely meet - senators generally relied on extended debate, negotiation, exhaustion, and ultimately up-or-down final passage votes rather than the special process established by Rule XXII.
The modern Senate Thune cites as an example bears little resemblance to that earlier institution. The Senate’s reliance on cloture gradually accelerated in the late twentieth century, then exploded after 2008. The trend is especially apparent when examining the cumulative number of cloture motions filed since 1917.
Nearly two-thirds of all cloture motions filed since the Senate adopted Rule XXII have been filed during the last eighteen years. In other words, most of the Senate’s reliance on cloture to end debate happened recently. The Senate has not relied on cloture throughout its “modern history” as Thune claims.
The majority party’s recent reliance on cloture is also evident in its success rate in invoking it.
The upward trend in successful cloture motions is a relatively recent phenomenon. Historically, cloture frequently failed because senators lacked the supermajority necessary to invoke it. In contrast, Senate majorities file cloture almost routinely. And they successfully invoke it more often than before. They treat it as the default mechanism for moving legislation to a final vote.
The Takeaway
The evidence points to a simple conclusion. For much of the Senate’s history, cloture was the exception rather than the rule. Only in recent decades has it become the Senate’s default method for ending debate.