Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
whether or not there is any functional difference in terms of Senate action between a procedural and a talking filibuster.
There is, I have already explained it clearly. https://www.politifact.com/article/2...senate-moving/
Historically, a filibuster — the talking kind — would halt all business on the Senate floor until the parties were able to resolve their differences or one party backed down. To avoid having important legislation held hostage to a filibuster, Senate leaders decided they would acknowledge the filibuster, by stopping work on that bill but simply moving on to other business that wasn’t as controversial. This shift to a two-track system was intended to be constructive: It limited the damage that a filibuster could cause for the rest of the legislative agenda. But it had an unintended consequence — it became easy to filibuster, since the tiring work of talking a bill to death was no longer needed. Instead, all a minority had to do was say they were blocking a bill; that would essentially be enough to stop the bill in its tracks.

Moving back to the talking filibuster is the removal of the two-track system. The procedural or 'silent' filibuster is the two-track system, there is no incorrect conflation here cause it is the same thing. They call it the two track system because the bill itself gets moved onto a separate track from the floor as a whole, but a talking filibuster cannot have a two-track system because the talking takes up the floors agenda.

In my understanding the invocation of cloture is strictly for the sake of the bill under filibuster and that the rules would allow just what I said (though in practice there would be no incentive for a filibustering Senator to continue speaking. Someone willing to dive into the Senate rules can offer a resolution, but in abstract it's unclear to me what the exact effective provisions of a "two-track" system would be, in response to the filibuster of the 1960s, if not this.
Invoking cloture would roughly be the same under both systems, you get 60 Senators to agree to end debate on the matter. For a procedural/silent filibuster the petition can be made whenever on the floor and then there's a bunch of arcane steps like waiting a full day before moving on with the vote. It would be the same process with a talking filibuster but I don't think they would keep the bit about waiting a full day before voting on it. You can't have parallel processing on a talking filibuster and that is where your misconception is.


...what? The measure of a filibuster isn't in its success. It was a filibuster.
Lol, a filibuster by definition is a delay or prevention of the consideration of a bill through defined Senate rules however they define them. If I speak for 35 minutes on a bill that has 20 hours of debate allotted is that a filibuster? What difference does it make if he spoke for 5 minutes, 35 minutes, or 15 hours if the speech fit within the existing timeline for debate. This is just wrong.

There was a lot of filibustering in 2010.
Shifting goalpost, but ok.

I'm not finding any polling that supports your assessment of public attitudes around the shutdown. As I can find most either blamed Obama/Dems or "both sides." At any rate, your dismissiveness here is hard to square with a conviction that obstruction will redound against the Republican Party: 'it's gonna, but it never has because reasons. But it's gonna!'
https://www.latimes.com/nation/polit...007-story.html
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...-idUSKCN1OQ1FA
https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...c3e_story.html
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/voter...tdown_n_842769
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/11/68430...ngest-in-histo
https://millercenter.org/1995-96-government-shutdown
https://www.langerresearch.com/wp-co...vtShutdown.pdf