In a democracy, a majority of voters make decisions. Shocking!

At least it is for Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who asks, “Do we want a simple majority of 51 to ramrod the minority on every issue?”

That’s the way it has been throughout American history.

George W. Bush became president with a bare majority of electoral votes and less than half of the popular vote. Almost every major policy, including military action in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been approved by a majority vote in Congress. The U.S. House of Representatives always uses the majority vote.

In fact, the use of a simple majority is so engrained in the American political system that the Constitution specifically mentions only nine matters on which anything more than a simple majority is required.

But there is one place where a majority is not enough. In the U.S. Senate, it takes 60 of the 100 votes to end debate on a bill. Otherwise, there will be no vote on the bill, and it dies.

The process of ending debate is called cloture, and the way of preventing cloture is the filibuster.

The Senate’s traditions and rules provide that debate is unlimited and continues until the vote on a bill. In 1917, in order to find a way to get bills to a vote, cloture was adopted.

In response to this rule, the filibuster ”“ endless debate by senators holding the floor ”“ grew up, but it was used only once or twice a year by southern senators opposing civil rights proposals.

In recent years, Senate Republicans, with more than 40 members, have blocked cloture about 100 times during each two-year Congress.

Though they have been a minority in the Senate, they have been able to block major pieces of legislation. Recently, on a motion to end debate on a bill to require more information about political contributions, all Republicans, including Maine’s two senators, successfully voted against ending debate, despite there being a majority in favor of moving to a vote.

The Affordable Care Act, called “Obamacare” by its opponents, only passed because at the time of the vote, there were 60 Democratic senators.

McConnell says the GOP must use the filibuster, because Sen. Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader, will not allow Republicans to offer their amendments to bills under consideration. McConnell is correct in charging that Reid limits amendments to an unusual degree, but the Democrat says he worries that Republicans will offer amendments endlessly, preventing a vote on the bill.

Every two years, at the beginning of each new Congress, the Senate adopts its rules by a simple majority. In 2011, some Democratic senators proposed rules to limit filibuster use, but Reid and McConnell agreed instead on greater cooperation. The Democratic leader then squashed reformist members of his party.

Now Reid has regrets. He says that there was little cooperation. A couple of weeks ago, he said that if the Democrats have a Senate majority next year, he wants to kill the filibuster.

As McConnell observes, if a party adopted major policies by a slim majority, they might soon be reversed by the change of a few votes at the next election. McConnell threatens that if the GOP has a majority and abolished the filibuster next year, the Senate could repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Each party has come to see the filibuster as a way of controlling the national agenda even though it is in the Senate minority. Without the filibuster, its advocates argue, the country could lurch from one side to another, whenever the composition of the Senate changes by just a handful of votes. The people would have little certainty about the direction in which the country was headed.

The filibuster promotes large, bi-partisan majorities, they say. The only problem is that those majorities have failed to form.

The ability of the Senate minority to block any major decisions or even the approval of presidential appointments is probably the greatest obstacle to the federal government making decisions.

Though the filibuster rule may not be well understood by the public, it is likely the most important single cause of public disapproval of Congress. Perhaps the absence of the filibuster, leaving decisions to a majority, could promote more compromise.

Knowing that any decision risked being reversed relatively easily, senators might be less bold but more constructive. If they sought agreements that had broad enough bipartisan support to reduce the risk of reversal after the next election, durable decisions might be made.

The end of the filibuster could turn out to be the best way to get Congress working again.

— Gordon L. Weil is an author, publisher, consultant, and former official of international organizations and the U.S. and Maine governments.