Also in the ’70s, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), who was majority whip (and had by then disavowed his membership in the Ku Klux Klan), introduced “dual tracking,” which allowed the majority leader to set aside one slow-moving piece of legislation to move onto the next. Before that, the Senate considered one bill, one nomination at a time and a filibuster blocked everything the Senate was doing, as Ezra Klein explained in a 2009 column for The Post. It was the equivalent of stopping the government, which meant the incentives to keep it from happening — as well as the pressure on the person filibustering to make it good — were sky high.

Source: Washington Post July 05, 2021 15:00 UTC