Imagine please, a fast train, a locomotive if you wish. It keeps going and going. One stop after another is passed up. The train keeps going. Along the way some of the passengers begin to grumble. They have other things to do and need to at some point, take another route. This requires they be let off at a station but the locomotive doesn't care. It just keeps going. So the passengers begin to war inside and even war with each other. The louder they get, the faster the train goes. What that train needs is some kind of braking system.
The train is like our governing administrations. They have no braking system if you remove the filibuster.
The filibuster is a tool our representatives can use to alert us. When we hear of a filibuster on an issue, we the people are supposed to find out what we think about that particular issue then write our newspapers to get dialog going and also write our representatives.
In my grandfather's days, they used the filibuster to indefinately stall important decisions from being met, important issues from being discussed. This is NOT what a filibuster is to be used for, so we evoked a cloture(sp) which gave us back a filibuster to slow the damn train down!
For an update on the argument which is intended to keep the filibuster in place or to completely do away with it so the House can run over the people with their agenda without ever having to ask us what we think, please follow this link.
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