The filibuster serves two roles.
The obvious one is that it forces bills to have more than just a bare majority, which in the long run should lend some stability to the law, avoiding random see-sawing that could occur in a series of closely divided Senates. For anyone who thinks the law should be something people can rely upon, that’s an admirable goal for non-urgent matters.
Another role is to ensure that legislation is fully debated before coming to a vote — no bum rushes pushed through by even a moderately large majority. Again, an admirable goal. Poorly vetted laws should be avoided.
But traditionally those goals have been approached with somewhat all-or-nothing rules. If a Senator has the floor they can continue to hold it until exhaustion. If the majority is one vote shy of cloture, the bill dies.
An alternative approach would be to allot a fixed number of debate hours to every Senator every session, then let them decide how to allocate some (or all) of their hours to extend the debate on any given bill. Those privately allocable hours would be added to the default allocation of hours for the bill that would occur given current practice.
This policy would clearly address the second role above. Any Senator who really wanted a fuller discussion of any bill could unilaterally force that to happen, without the need for theatrical grandstanding of a traditional personal filibuster. Among other things, they could allocate that time to several of their colleagues to address the issue from several perspectives. It would avoid rushed passage by even a large majority as effectively as any of the schemes of the past century. That would be a clear advantage over the traditional “Mr. Smith” filibuster. (Something like a the traditional supermajority cloture vote, perhaps increased back to 2/3, could limit the ability of a single senator to abuse this power to delay a time-critical matter that had overwhelming support.)
An allotment approach would also give the minority significant leverage to delay individual bills for substantial periods, without totally stymying the majority. If the minority kept their powder dry and used their hours sparingly or not at all there would be a point in any session where they could effectively stop action on any single bill until the session ended, making it as strong a traditional filibuster. But they would need to be selective — a scattershot approach to delay every vote would quickly exhaust their quiver. That should be a good thing — the minority would have significant leverage to delay votes they had extreme objections to it, but would deny them the ability to stop all progress by the majority.
Basically, such a policy would change the ability of the minority to say “No!” into the ability to say “Not so fast!”.
Given the recent and current polarization, I’d argue this would be a good compromise, throwing out the bath water of destructive obstruction while saving the baby of deliberate debate.
Food for thought.
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