Yglesias, also a blogger at ThinkProgress, said:
Although the filibuster and cloture issue is technically about debate, and defenders of it talk about debate, I think it is worth being clear that actual debating of issues is almost invariably a red herring in these kinds of contexts.
When you have a minority of senators saying they we won't grant cloture on Craig Becker's nomination to the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board], that's not actually because they have more things they want to say about it. It's a tactic that you see has dual uses. One is to impose a super-majority requirement, to say that you can't pass a bill or confirm a nominee unless you have 60 senators, rather than 50. And the other, which in some ways I think has become more important and underrated, is to purely delay action. That the process of filing a cloture petition and letting it ripen takes quite a bit of time, particularly because you can sort of dual-track your refusal to grant unanimous consent and force multiple filings of petition to ever get to a final vote on an issue.
The entire panel discussion is available here or by clicking picture.
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