Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, along with Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., took to the air ways on “Face the Nation” on Sunday, April 7, 2013, and attacked Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who, among a group of other conservative senators, have threatened to filibuster the impending gun control bill. But in so doing, McCain and Schumer, long term Senate veterans, seemed not to understand the purpose of a filibuster.
McCain and Schumer, while not mentioning Cruz by name, implied that he was trying to block a debate on the gun control bill, the center of which is a controversial background check. “The purpose of the United States Senate is to debate and to vote and to let the people know where we stand,” McCain said, according to Mediaite.
However a Senate filibuster is a tactic used not to prevent debate on a bill but to prevent debate from being cut off. In a classic filibuster, a senator or group of senators will take to the floor and attempt to literally talk a bill to death. In recent years, the mere threat of a filibuster has prevented votes on bills. But recently, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky, occupied the Senate floor for 13 hours, with the aid of other senators such as Cruz, and ruminated about the use of armed drones to kill Americans citizens on American soil to force the administration to state point blank it would never do such a thing.
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