ORIGINS

The Senate's first rules contained one restriction on debate that is still in force today: the ``two-speech rule,'' which in its current form prohibits a Senator from speaking more than twice on the same question in the same legislative day. The original rules also provided for a motion for the previous question. However, rather than (as it now provides) allowing supporters to cut off debate to proceed to a vote on a matter, the previous question as then used allowed opponents to postpone the consideration of the matter. It appears that the motion was used infrequently to end consideration of an issue, and it was eliminated from Senate Rules in 1806 on the grounds that it had seldom been invoked at all.

Otherwise, from the earliest days Senate rules have offered individual Senators substantial procedural prerogatives. In particular, debate was normally unlimited, the Chair exercised no discretion in recognition, were non-germane amendments are normally permitted.

Filibusters were not initially a common Senate practice; only three outstanding examples are generally identified before the 1860s. One reason was that workload pressures were usually light enough to make a successful filibuster unlikely except at the close of a Congress when adjournment deadlines made the threat of extended debate more viable. Until the twentieth amendment to the Constitution took effect in 1933 establishing the current session schedule of Congress, each congressional session normally convened in December, and the last session continued until the constitutional term of the Congress expired on March 4. As the end of this ``short session'' approached, filibusters became increasingly effective. When filibusters became more common, they seem to have been associated chiefly with this point in the schedule.

Beginning in 1841, proposals were offered to provide for the motion for the previous question to end debate, but they were never adopted. Instead, by 1846 the Senate began a practice of setting a time for a final vote on a pending question by unanimous consent. In the following years such agreements became common. These proceedings originated the Senate's practice, still evolving today, of regulating the consideration of many measures by means of unanimous consent time agreements.