H.Res. 1369

[Congressional Bills 119th Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[H. Res. 1369 Introduced in House (IH)]

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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.

_______________________________________________________________________

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 the Framers of the Constitution.

SEC. 3. TRANSMISSION.

The Clerk of the House of Representatives shall transmit a copy of 
this resolution to the President pro tempore of the United States 
Senate, the Majority Leader of the Senate, the Minority Leader of the 
Senate, and to each Member of the Senate.
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