Sen. Jeff Merkley argues case for old-fashioned filibuster in new book

(PORTLAND TRIBUNE) — For Jeff Merkley’s newest book “Filibustered!” he looks back at two events spanning more than four decades in the U.S. Senate.

The first was in summer 1976, when he was a student at Stanford University, two years out of David Douglas High School. As a summer intern for U.S. Sen. Mark Hatfield, Merkley was assigned to monitor Senate debate on a tax bill with 125 pending amendments. Back then, Senate sessions were not televised — C-SPAN began broadcasting them in 1986 — and there was no internet, no instant messaging and no cell phones for someone to keep abreast of the debate if that person was not in the Senate chamber itself.

So it fell to Merkley to keep Hatfield, a Republican from Oregon, informed on where the proceedings stood. Each amendment was subject to a time limit on debate — but could be added or rejected by a simple majority vote.

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“You would never have known that such a thing as the filibuster existed,” Merkley said at a recent appearance at Powell’s City of Books in Portland. “They were debating, considering every point of view and reaching conclusions. They were not wasting time.”

The second was on April 5, 2017, when Merkley — a Democrat well into his second term in the Senate seat that Hatfield once occupied — decided to speak against Republican President Donald Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Like most Democrats, Merkley was angry with the 2016 decision of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, not to schedule a hearing or vote on Democratic President Barack’s nominee for the seat vacated by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. (Merrick Garland did not get on the court, but Democratic President Joe Biden appointed him attorney general in 2021.)

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