BROOKE GLADSTONE:  From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. Bob Garfield is away this week. I’m Brooke Gladstone.

By Friday, the headlines were filled with stories of the US missile strike on Syria. Frankly, it's too early for us to address that media narrative or dissect the information flow. So we begin with this week's prevailing political story, the annihilation of what has been depicted by Democrats as a hallowed tradition, the Senate filibuster which, as of Thursday, could no longer be used to derail a Supreme Court nominee.

  [CLIPS]:

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT:  This is a Fox News alert. The Senate has voted to go nuclear, meaning the so-called “nuclear option.” That’s the decision, after Democrats blocked a full Senate vote on Judge Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

MALE CORRESPONDENT:  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell making a historic change to the Senate rules to clear the path forward for President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.

MALE CORRESPONDENT:  Which means that any party from now on can nominate a Supreme Court justice with a simple majority.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Since the Republicans lacked the 60 votes needed to end the Democratic filibuster, they voted instead to change the threshold. Presto, cloture achieved, filibuster folded and only 51 votes required to usher Nominee Neil Gorsuch onto the High Court. It’s called the nuclear option because the Republicans didn't really change the rule, as has been reported. They changed the interpretation of the rule, a rather more devious maneuver but one the Republicans had enough votes to pull off. The Democrats did much the same a few years back to block filibusters on lower court nominees. This time, it was Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who pushed the so-called “nuclear button.”

SENATE MAJORITY LEADER McCONNELL:  We need to restore the norms and traditions of the Senate and get past this unprecedented partisan filibuster.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Unprecedented, nontraditional, abnormal? Surely not.

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT:  The Founding Fathers hoped that there would be compromises there. That's why 60 votes were needed to pass anything.

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT:  Something that has made the Senate different from the House. That’s since the Founding Fathers. [LAUGHS]

MALE CORRESPONDENT:  The framers of our Constitution had the wisdom to create a Senate with a strong minority to serve as a check on runaway power.

MALE CORRESPONDENT:  And Alexander Hamilton would be rolling over in his grave.

  [END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Sarah Binder, author of Stalemate: Causes and Consequences of Legislative Gridlock, says that much of what’s been said about the fabled filibuster is, in fact, a fable.

SARAH BINDER:  So this is the key myth about the filibuster, that it was part of the framers’ design for the upper chamber. There's no evidence for that. In fact, back in 1789, the very first year, both chambers basically adopted a similar set of rules. The key rule – we use it in the House today to cut off debate by majority vote so that there can't be filibusters - that rule has a kind of funky name, the previous question motion.

  [BROOKE LAUGHS]

The House and the Senate, they both had this rule that allowed majorities to cut off debate but they didn't use it very consistently.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

SARAH BINDER:  Where does this go? It’s 1804. Aaron Burr kills Alexander Hamilton but he’s still the vice president, [LAUGHS] runs out of town. Back, 1805, he's in the chamber. He’s still dispensing advice in the Senate. And Burr says, you’re a great deliberative body but a really great chamber has a very clean rulebook and yours is a mess. And he singles out that previous question motion. They get rid of it in 1806, not because they wanted to create filibusters, right, not because they saw the great deliberative body of the Senate and they needed a right way to protect the rights of minorities. That rule was gone because Aaron Burr [LAUGHS] told them to get rid of it and it hadn’t been used yet.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  So I think it's fair to point out that parties themselves were not as important in Aaron’s Burr’s time as they later came to be.

SARAH BINDER:  Absolutely, right. They had factions, Hamilton versus Jefferson, and those became the basis of political parties, but it takes a while. And once partisanship heats up and once the big issues of the day become really, really tough and important, such as slavery, well, the minority decides in the Senate, we’re just gonna talk all night. So that’s, that's where our notions of filibusters come from. It’s certainly part of the traditions of the Senate, it’s just not original to the Senate.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Pundits talk about the ennobling power of the filibuster. You say that they are trying to get rid of it all along.

SARAH BINDER:  For sure. It was a slower Senate, more could participate. But even the great senators of the day, the Henry Clays of the world, the Daniel Websters, Nelson Aldrich later in the middle of the 19th century, each of them tried to create a rule that would today be called cloture. But every time they tried, the minority filibustered [LAUGHS] the motion to ban the filibuster. So it's certainly the case that these great leaders running the majority, they wanted to achieve things in the Senate.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

SARAH BINDER:  And so, they should have been frustrated by the minority, and there may have been times when the minority had a good effect. It might have stopped some bad stuff from happening, but also stopped good stuff from happening. And that's really the origins of why we got cloture in 1917.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Almost exactly 100 years ago. We just missed the anniversary in March.

SARAH BINDER:  I know it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  How did you celebrate?

SARAH BINDER:  Well, I didn’t discover it ‘til March 28^th.  [LAUGHING] I’d missed it by three weeks and I was really bummed.  

  [BROOKE LAUGHS]

I have to say, if anyone would have thrown a centennial birthday party for the cloture rule, it would have been me.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  But how did we get it, to begin with, and why?

SARAH BINDER:  Merchant ships were being shot at by the Germans in the run-up to World War I. Woodrow Wilson, the president, after seeing particular bills he saw as war measures, filibustered several years in a row. It was Wilson who really had the stroke of genius to fuse filibuster reform with security, to say that our country's security going into war depended on finding a way to limit filibusters. And so, he went around the country. He gave speeches. They burned in effigy the senators who were blocking the Senate, and he succeeded.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  There is, obviously, another concern that if you only need 51 votes, you're going to have far more partisan appointments to the courts. McCain referred to this.

  [CLIP]:

SENATOR JOHN McCAIN:  What do you think the next nominee is going to be like and then what do you think is going to happen when eventually the, the Democrats are in the majority in the Senate? And that's going to happen sooner or later.

  [END CLIP]

SARAH BINDER:  Even though we’ve not had outright floor filibusters recently, presidents knew that there could be a filibuster. Even as recently as Bush, for sure, and also Obama, right, Justice Kagan, Justice Sotomayor, they weren’t getting in the 90s of votes, but they got into the 60s. And that meant that the president was reaching out and finding nominees who were not for Democrats on the far left but had some claim to being in the center so that the other party would at least help vote for them.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  But we surely could have said that about Merrick Garland, as well.

SARAH BINDER:  Well, yeah. That is, I think, what sticks most in the craw of Democrats today, but I think we'll have to see what difference the filibuster change here has going forward. But certainly, we should expect more polarized nominees.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  By the way, where did the word “filibuster” come from?

SARAH BINDER:  We believe the Dutch used a word called

“vribuiter" who were basically people who jumped on ships and stole the stuff.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

SARAH BINDER:  There’s a word in Spanish, “filibustero,” and it was applied to people who basically marauded over Mexico in the 19th century. It seems to have come to the Senate sometime in the 19th century.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  [LAUGHS] Here, however, it seems to have dropped those piratical felonious connotations. Maybe it was Mr. Smith Going to Washington who did that.

  [CLIP]:

H.V. KALTENBORN, HIMSELF: …bleary eyed, voice gone, he can’t go on much longer. And all official Washington is here to be in on the kill.

JEFFERSON SMITH:  Just get up off the ground, that's all I ask. Get up there with that lady that's up on top of this Capitol dome, that lady that stands for liberty.

  [END CLIP]

SARAH BINDER:  He was sort of the, the noble defender against the bad guys. But more often when we think about filibusters historically, we’re really thinking about civil rights filibusters, blocking a Senate from going forward on voting rights, civil rights, and so forth. So yes, it has a story, sometimes negative, sometimes positive.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  This week, Senator Mitch McConnell, head of the Democrats, “Americans will be watching. History will be watching. And the future of the Senate will hang on their choice.” Will it?

SARAH BINDER:  Well, let’s give the leader his due. It is momentous. I don’t think Democrats want to see this happen and future Republicans, when they’re in the minority, they’ll be bummed it happened. [LAUGHS] However, I see today's change as part of a longer parliamentary arms race between these two political parties that's been going on at least since the 1980s. So this is not the high watermark of partisanship for the Senate, by any means. That day, I think, may yet come if a future majority decides they want to go “nuclear,” to ban filibusters of legislation. But this is just one more step up to empower majorities to rule.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Just another link in the chain.

SARAH BINDER:  For sure.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Would you be more exorcised if they did use the nuclear option against filibustering legislation?

SARAH BINDER:  My view as a political scientist is that legislators should take votes, and deep down, ultimately, filibusters are about blocking votes. And so, if a future Senate majority decides we’re going to do away with the filibuster altogether, I think that could be a good development for the Senate. To be honest, having the filibuster allows the majority to blame the minority when votes don't happen. And I think as voters, maybe we'd like to hold majorities accountable for the things they want to pursue, rather than allowing them to dodge behind filibusters.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  You don't think that a 49-member minority should have a chance to influence legislation?

SARAH BINDER:  Yes, ultimately doing away with the filibuster would limit the rights of the minority, for sure, and it would empower majorities. But those majorities would be held accountable. If voters are paying attention at election time, perhaps majorities would be slightly more cautious going forward.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Sarah, thank you very much.

SARAH BINDER:  Sure, thanks very much for having me.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Sarah Binder is a professor of political science at George Washington University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She’s the author of Stalemate: Causes and Consequences of Legislative Gridlock.

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Coming up, the IRS could make filing your taxes so much easier, if it weren’t blocked by H&R Block. This is On the Media.