[Congressional Bills 119th Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[H. Res. 1369 Introduced in House (IH)]
<DOC>
119th CONGRESS
2d Session
H. RES. 1369
Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the United
States Senate's current cloture and filibuster rules are contrary to
the constitutional design of two co-equal majoritarian legislative
bodies, are non-deliberative in practice, disenfranchise Members of the
House of Representatives and their constituents, and disrupt the proper
balance of powers between the two chambers of Congress, and for other
purposes.
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IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
June 15, 2026
Mr. Cloud submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the
Committee on Rules
_______________________________________________________________________
RESOLUTION
Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the United
States Senate's current cloture and filibuster rules are contrary to
the constitutional design of two co-equal majoritarian legislative
bodies, are non-deliberative in practice, disenfranchise Members of the
House of Representatives and their constituents, and disrupt the proper
balance of powers between the two chambers of Congress, and for other
purposes.
Resolved,
SECTION 1. FINDINGS WITH RESPECT TO THE SENATE FILIBUSTER.
(a) Founders' Intent Regarding Two Majoritarian Deliberative Bodies
of Equal Weight.--The House of Representatives finds the following:
(1) The Framers of the Constitution deliberately designed
the United States Congress as a bicameral legislature composed
of two co-equal chambers, each intended to operate on the
principle of majority rule. As James Madison wrote in
Federalist No. 58: ``In all cases where justice or the general
good might require new laws to be passed, or active measures to
be pursued, the fundamental principle of free government would
be reversed'' if a minority faction could defeat the wishes of
the majority.
(2) Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 22, explicitly
condemned supermajority requirements as fundamentally anti-
republican in nature, writing: ``Its real operation is to
embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the
government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or
artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto, to
the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable
majority.''. Hamilton warned that requiring more than a
majority to act ``tends to subject the sense of the greater
number to that of the lesser number.''.
(3) The Constitutional Convention of 1787 specifically and
deliberately rejected supermajority requirements as the default
rule for ordinary legislation. The Constitution enumerates only
six circumstances in which a supermajority is required--
ratification of treaties (article II, section 2), conviction on
impeachment (article I, section 3), expulsion of members
(article I, sections 2 and 5), overriding a presidential veto
(article I, section 7), proposing constitutional amendments
(article V), and restoring the rights of former Confederates
(section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment)--and ordinary
legislation is conspicuously absent from this list.
(4) As Madison recorded in his Notes on the Constitutional
Convention, when a supermajority requirement for ordinary
legislation was proposed, it was rejected by the delegates
precisely because they understood that majority rule was the
bedrock of republican governance. Madison himself wrote in
Federalist No. 51 that in a republic, ``it is of great
importance . . . not only to guard the society against the
oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society
against the injustice of the other part,'' a protection
achieved through representative majorities--not through
minority veto.
(5) The Senate was designed as a deliberative check--not as
a chamber capable of nullifying majority will indefinitely. As
Madison noted at the Constitution Convention in June 1787, the
Senate's role was to provide ``a necessary fence against . . .
the fickleness and passion'' of momentary majorities--a check
achieved through longer terms, smaller size, and staggered
elections, not through procedural rules enabling indefinite
minority obstruction of majority legislation.
(b) The Current Senate Filibuster Is Not Deliberative.--The House
finds the following:
(1) The original Senate filibuster, whatever its historical
justification, required Senators to maintain continuous floor
debate as a mechanism to delay rather than permanently defeat
legislation, thereby preserving at least a nominal form of
deliberation. The modern filibuster, as reformed in 1975 and
subsequently, requires only that forty-one senators signal
their intent to object--without requiring any senator to be
present on the floor, to speak, or to engage in debate of any
kind.
(2) The Senate's ``two-track system'' implemented in the
1970s, transformed the filibuster from an act of extended
deliberation into a procedural veto exercisable by a minority
without any requirement for sustained engagement with the
legislation at issue. Under current Senate practice, a minority
of senators may prevent a bill passed by the House from
receiving a vote by simply refusing to invoke cloture--without
ever setting foot on the Senate floor to debate the merits of
the legislation.
(3) The Supreme Court of the United States, in INS v.
Chadha, 462 U.S. 919 (1983), reaffirmed that the Constitution's
explicit procedural requirements for legislation reflect
careful and deliberate choices by the Framers. Justice Burger,
writing for the Court, emphasized that the procedures of
bicameralism and presentment ``are integral parts of the
constitutional design for the separation of powers'' and that
departures from constitutionally prescribed procedure undermine
the representative character of the legislative process.
(4) A procedure that permits forty-one senators--
potentially representing as little as eleven percent of the
American population--to prevent the Senate from voting on
legislation passed by a majority of the House of
Representatives and supported by a majority of the Senate
cannot be characterized as deliberation; it is, rather, a
procedural mechanism for the exercise of minority veto power
antithetical to the republican form of government guaranteed to
the states by article IV, section 4 of the Constitution.
(c) The Current Senate Filibuster Is Counter to the Intent of Two
Co-Equal Majoritarian Bodies.--The House finds the following:
(1) The Constitution vests all legislative powers in a
Congress composed of two chambers, each of which was designed
to reflect--through different mechanisms--the will of the
American people. Article I, section 1 states plainly: ``All
legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress
of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House
of Representatives.'' The use of the conjunctive reflects the
Framers' design that both chambers act--not that one chamber's
minority may indefinitely prevent the other chamber's majority-
passed legislation from receiving a vote.
(2) The Senate was never designed to be a chamber in which
forty-one members could permanently and without deliberation
defeat legislation desired by a majority of both chambers. The
Framers' intent, as reflected in the Constitutional text and in
the Federalist Papers, was that legislation supported by a
majority of each chamber, and signed by the President, would
become law--with the check on majority excess supplied not by
minority veto but by the structural features of bicameralism,
the presidential veto, and judicial review.
(3) In United States v. Ballin, 144 U.S. 1 (1892), the
Supreme Court held that each House of Congress has broad
authority to establish its own rules of proceeding, but that
such rules must not ``ignore constitutional restraints or
violate fundamental rights''. A Senate rule that effectively
nullifies the deliberative and majoritarian function of the
House of Representatives, as an institution co-equal under
article I, raises serious questions about whether such a rule
operates within constitutional limits.
(4) The Senate filibuster, as currently practiced, produces
a structural asymmetry between the two chambers wholly foreign
to the constitutional design: the House of Representatives,
which must pass legislation by majority vote, has its
deliberative output systematically negated not by a Senate
majority's considered rejection, but by a Senate minority's
procedural objection--leaving the House majority without any
meaningful legislative recourse and rendering House passage of
legislation an exercise without practical consequence whenever
Senate minority opposition exists.
(d) The Senate Filibuster Prevents Legislation Passed by the House
From Receiving Proper Consideration in the Senate.--The House finds the
following:
(1) The Constitution's bicameral design contemplates that
legislation passed by one chamber will be considered by the
other chamber on its merits and ultimately accepted, rejected,
or amended by majority action in that chamber. The current
Senate filibuster permits legislation passed by the House of
Representatives to be tabled indefinitely without a floor vote,
without committee action, and without any substantive
consideration of its merits by the Senate as a body.
(2) The Supreme Court in Chadha noted that the procedures
of article I, section 7--requiring passage by both Houses--were
designed to ensure that legislation reflects considered
deliberation by both chambers. When one chamber's output is
systematically blocked from consideration by the other
chamber's procedural rules, the bicameral design is subverted:
one of the two constitutionally required steps in the
legislative process is made effectively optional by minority
fiat.
(3) The constitutional design of the Senate as a
deliberative body capable of amending, improving, and checking
legislation passed by the House is not served--but rather
undermined--by procedural rules that prevent the Senate as a
body from ever deliberating on House-passed legislation.
Deliberation requires engagement with the substance of
legislation; a procedural block imposed before Senate floor
consideration begins forecloses rather than fulfills the
deliberative function.
(4) Thomas Jefferson, in his Manual of Parliamentary
Practice, written for the Senate and long influential in both
chambers, emphasized that the purpose of parliamentary
procedure was to facilitate the orderly expression of the
majority's will while protecting the minority's right to be
heard--not to arm a minority with the power to permanently
prevent the majority from acting. Jefferson wrote that ``the
object of rules of order'' is to allow ``the will of the
assembly'' to prevail, and that procedural dilatory motions
were to be guarded against as corruptions of the legislative
process.
(e) The Senate Filibuster Unconstitutionally Disenfranchises the
House, Its Members, and the People They Represent.--The House finds the
following:
(1) The House of Representatives was designed by the
Framers as the chamber most directly accountable to the people
of the United States. As Madison wrote in Federalist No. 52,
the House was to have ``an immediate dependence on, and an
intimate sympathy with, the people''--a design reflected in
two-year terms, proportional representation, and direct popular
election. When Senate procedural rules systemically prevent
House-passed legislation from receiving a Senate vote, the
political accountability that justifies the House's
representative function is undermined.
(2) The equal dignity and constitutional standing of the
House of Representatives as a co-equal branch of Congress is
impaired when Senate rules are deployed to ensure that
legislation passed by a majority of the House is never
considered on the merits by the Senate. The constitutional
design places both chambers on equal footing as necessary
participants in the legislative process; a Senate procedural
rule that renders one chamber's majority action a nullity
disrupts the constitutional balance between the two Houses.
(3) The voters who elect Members of the House of
Representatives do so with the reasonable and constitutionally
grounded expectation that their representative, if part of a
legislative majority, can pass legislation that will be
considered--and accepted or rejected on the merits--by the
Senate. When the Senate filibuster prevents that consideration,
the votes of House members' constituents are effectively
nullified not by a Senate majority's substantive disagreement,
but by a Senate minority's procedural refusal to permit a vote.
(4) The Supreme Court has consistently held that the right
to vote includes the right to have one's vote counted and to
have it carry its constitutionally intended weight. In Reynolds
v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964), Chief Justice Warren wrote that
``the right of suffrage can be denied by a debasement or
dilution of the weight of a citizen's vote just as effectively
as by wholly prohibiting the free exercise of the franchise''.
While Reynolds addressed apportionment, its core principle--
that procedural mechanisms that systematically diminish the
effective weight of votes are constitutionally suspect--applies
with force to Senate rules that render the legislative output
of popularly elected House majorities meaningless.
(5) In Wesberry v. Sanders, 376 U.S. 1 (1964), the Supreme
Court held that article I, section 2's requirement that
Representatives be chosen ``by the People'' means that ``as
nearly as is practicable one man's vote in a congressional
election is to be worth as much as another's.''. The principle
that representation must carry meaningful weight is subverted
when the legislation passed by the elected representatives of
the people is prevented from receiving consideration in the
Senate by the procedural objection of a minority of senators
representing a small fraction of the national population.
(6) The disenfranchisement imposed by the filibuster is
particularly acute because it is asymmetric: Senators from less
populous states, representing far fewer constituents than the
Senators and Representatives they obstruct, wield the power to
nullify legislation supported by elected officials representing
a substantial majority of the American people. This outcome is
incompatible with the republican principle, affirmed throughout
the Federalist Papers, that in a representative government, the
majority's will, expressed through duly elected
representatives, must ultimately be capable of prevailing.
SEC. 2. ADDITIONAL FINDINGS AND SENSE OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
WITH RESPECT TO THE FILIBUSTER.
(a) Findings.--The House of Representatives finds the following:
(1) The Framers of the Constitution intended both the House
of Representatives and the United States Senate to operate as
majoritarian deliberative bodies of equal constitutional
standing.
(2) The current Senate filibuster, as practiced under the
two-track system established in the 1970s, is not a
deliberative mechanism but a procedural veto device enabling a
minority of senators to prevent floor votes without engaging in
any form of substantive debate.
(3) The current Senate filibuster is contrary to the
Framers' intent that ordinary legislation be subject to
majority rule in each chamber, as demonstrated by the text of
the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and the records of the
Constitutional Convention.
(4) The Senate filibuster prevents legislation passed by
the House of Representatives from receiving proper deliberative
consideration in the Senate, subverting the bicameral design of
article I of the Constitution.
(5) The Senate filibuster unconstitutionally
disenfranchises Members of the House of Representatives and the
constituents they represent by rendering House majority action
without meaningful legislative consequence.
(6) The Senate filibuster, as currently practiced, disrupts
the proper constitutional balance between the two co-equal
chambers of Congress.
(b) Sense of the House.--It is the sense of the House of
Representatives that--
(1) the United States Senate should reform or abolish its
cloture and filibuster rules to restore the principle of
majority rule to Senate proceedings on legislation;
(2) the Senate should establish procedures ensuring that
legislation passed by a majority of the House of
Representatives receives a timely floor vote in the Senate,
with final disposition determined by a majority of Senators
present and voting;
(3) Senate rules should preserve the minority's right to be
heard and to offer amendments, while ensuring that the minority
cannot permanently prevent a majority from acting;
(4) the constitutional design of two co-equal majoritarian
chambers requires that both the House and the Senate operate on
the fundamental principle that, after adequate deliberation, a
majority determines the outcome; and
(5) Congress as a whole is best served by procedural rules
in both chambers that facilitate deliberation, accountability,
and majority governance, consistent with the constitutional
vision articulated by t