The United States Senate is a unique institution. Other legislative bodies lack its peculiar rules, which require a supermajority vote to get most things done.
In the Senate, a voting minority can hold up business by extending debate, a tactic we call a filibuster. The members of the Senate can end a filibuster by voting to shut off debate (cloture).
The requirement for doing this has evolved over time. Before 1975, it took a two-thirds majority to end debate and force a vote. Now cloture requires only a three-fifths majority.
We have also carved out other exceptions to the rule over the years. In 2013 and 2017, it was changed so that executive and judicial confirmations could go through on simple majorities. Another change, adopted as part of the modern budgeting process, allows certain budgetary items such as the ones that have been working their way through Congress this month to pass with only a simple majority.
Melissa Moschella, Author at The Federalist thefederalist.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thefederalist.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
People gather to protest in front of the Mark O. Hatfield federal courthouse in downtown Portland, Oregon as the city experiences another night of unrest on July 27, 2020. For over 57 straight nights, protesters in downtown Portland have faced off in often violent clashes with the Portland Police Bureau and, more recently, federal officers. | Getty Images/Spencer Platt
A George Washington University academic and author warned during a recent panel discussion about the acceleration of an “anti-liberal progressive nationalism” that “seeks to impose a highly specific and controversial vision of social order.”
Dr. Samuel Goldman, the executive director of the John L. Loeb, Jr. Institute for Religious Freedom and the director of the Politics and Values Program at George Washington University, spoke during a discussion titled “Evaluating Liberalism” hosted by Baylor University Friday.
The Altar of the Transfiguration in St. Peter s Basilica at the Vatican in February 2013 (Wikimedia Commons/Westerdam)
A new instruction from the Vatican s Secretariat of State has banned the practice of individual Masses inside St. Peter s Basilica and places strict limits on the use of the Latin rite.
A March 12 letter outlining the new measures has sent shockwaves through traditionalist Catholic communities who have described the suppression of individual Masses as forcing uniformity, while delighting reformists who see it as a long overdue prioritization of the communal nature of the Mass.
Some 3,000 bishops, priests and theologians filled St. Peter s Basilica during the years of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and among its groundbreaking reforms was to adapt the liturgy more suitably to the needs of our own times.
WASHINGTON (CNS) Patrick Kelly s formal installation as the 14th Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus is still off in the indefinite future because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but he officially began his new job March 1 at the Knights headquarters in New Haven, Connecticut.