'The public business must go forward': Why the Founders would have hated filibusters.

The Senate filibuster is an accident of history that deserves our contempt, not our protection. 

The filibuster emerged as an unintended byproduct of a rule change in 1806. At the Constitutional Convention, the founders certainly never imagined requiring a supermajority of 60 votes to pass legislation. One of the chief defects of the Articles of Confederation, according to critics at the time, was precisely the requirement of a supermajority to enact anything of significance.