Meaning
To block or delay legislative business by exploiting procedural rules - classically by speaking without end so a measure can never come to a vote. As a noun it names both the marathon speech and the tactic, the emblem of a lone legislator, or a determined minority, grinding a chamber to a halt. In US contexts nearly always about the Senate and its supermajority cloture threshold; in general use it covers any obstructive marathon performance. Regional use: General English; institutional senses strongest in US politics.
Origin
The word began as a term for pirates. Etymonline traces it to the Dutch vrijbuiter, freebooter, which surfaced in a 1587 English book as flibutors for the West Indian buccaneers of the 1590s, was reabsorbed in the late eighteenth century from French as flibustier, and took its modern form in the early 1850s from the Spanish filibustero - the label pinned on lawless American adventurers such as William Walker, who launched freelance invasions of Latin American states. Etymonline records the extended legislative sense, obstructing legislation by deliberately prolonged speaking, from 1863. The practice long predates the word: Cato the Younger talked the Roman Senate past nightfall in 60 BC to block measures benefiting Julius Caesar, and in the US Senate the tactic became possible only after an 1806 rules change and was first used in 1837. Joseph Biggar brought it to the House of Commons in 1874, and Charles Stewart Parnell's Irish party weaponized it until procedural closures were rewritten.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- break a filibuster
- filibustering
- launch a filibuster
Usage Examples
- A single senator threatened to filibuster the appropriations bill unless the broadband clause came out.
- The reformers lacked the sixty votes needed to break a filibuster, so the nomination quietly died.
- Westminster never saw American-style filibusters, but Biggar's all-night speeches in 1874 came close.