A Man Must Stand Up For What He Believes

Once was, a man had to stand and stand up for what they believed in—today, they can make a quiet hold in the U.S. Senate and go home to dinner.

Still, anyone who has seen the film loves when Jimmy Stewart talks himself dry in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). He is against a political machine and decides to go down speaking. The public finally starts to wonder why. School kids help him. He turns public opinion and wins.

This is no longer America—at least not the America a majority of U.S. Senators want.

The talking filibuster remains one of the U.S. Senate’s most distinctive and enduring traditions. Unlike today’s “silent” filibuster—where a senator merely signals opposition, forcing a 60-vote cloture threshold to proceed—the classic talking version demands continuous, physical possession of the floor through marathon speeches. This tactic once preserved the Senate’s foundational principle of unlimited debate, protecting minority voices but often frustrating majority will.

Its origins date to the Senate’s first session. On September 22, 1789, Pennsylvania Senator William Maclay noted in his diary that Virginians sought to “talk away the time” to kill a bill. Because the Senate never adopted the House’s “previous question” motion to end debate, unlimited speech became baked into its rules—by design or early procedural accident. The term “filibuster,” borrowed from Dutch and Spanish words for pirates or freebooters, entered congressional lexicon by the 1850s as lawmakers complained of “filibustering speeches.”

For over a century, no formal mechanism existed to stop debate short of unanimous consent. Filibusters grew disruptive as the Senate expanded. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson’s frustration over a filibuster blocking merchant-ship arming during World War I prompted Rule XXII. Adopted March 8, 1917, it allowed two-thirds cloture to end debate. The rule’s first test came in 1919 on the Treaty of Versailles, yet supermajorities proved elusive; cloture succeeded only five times in the next four decades. Southern Democrats famously wielded it against civil-rights bills.

Iconic talking filibusters showcased its theatrical power. Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette spoke for free speech in wartime (1917). Louisiana’s Huey Long filibustered New Deal measures in the 1930s, reading the Constitution aloud for hours. Oregon’s Wayne Morse set records in the 1950s to spotlight national issues. South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond held the floor for 24 hours and 18 minutes in 1957 against the Civil Rights Act, sustained by phone books and state statutes. Most recently, New Jersey’s Cory Booker shattered that mark in April 2025 with 25 hours and 5 minutes opposing Trump administration policies.

The 1975 reform lowered cloture to three-fifths (60 votes) of all senators duly sworn. Combined with the two-track system, it birthed the silent filibuster, rendering marathon speeches rare. Senators now leverage procedural objections rather than physical endurance.

No depiction captured the talking filibuster’s drama better than Frank Capra’s 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The Senate’s official history page recounts the climactic scene verbatim: “From a back-row desk on the Democratic side of a crowded Senate Chamber, the idealistic freshman member labored into the 24th hour of a one-man filibuster. His secretary sat in the gallery frantically signaling which rules would keep him from losing the floor… the exhausted senator then collapsed. As overturned baskets of telegrams cascaded paper over the junior member’s prone body, the senior senator suddenly changed course” and confessed his corruption.

Premiering October 17, 1939, at Constitution Hall before 45 real senators and 250 House members, the Jimmy Stewart vehicle became a box-office sensation (second only to Gone with the Wind). Some senators decried it as “silly,” yet the heroic narrative cemented the talking filibuster in popular culture as principled defiance.

It is time for such heroism again!