And the party out of power, along with its sympathizers and shills in the intellectual firmament, has worked to shore up the filibuster as a way of putting a stop to things that it doesn’t like.

The filibuster is a procedural, not constitutional, requirement and can be changed. Technically, it’s been on the Senate books since 1917, but the facts of the matter are more complicated.

“The tactic of using long speeches to delay action on legislation appeared in the very first session of the Senate,” the United States Senate website notes on the evolution of the filibuster. In other words, it’s always been the nature of the senatorial beast to stall and slow things down.

A likely apocryphal exchange between Thomas Jefferson and George Washington added some support to the procedure and practice of filibustering. The story was reported in Harper’s in 1884. It had Jefferson, who missed the Constitutional Convention on account of being an ambassador to France at the time, returning to Virginia and objecting to the institution of the Senate.

Jefferson, the story goes, met with Washington privately and gently poked at the general-turned-president for having agreed to a legislature with two chambers. Washington responded by seemingly changing the subject and got the better of his brilliant critic.

“Why,” asked Washington, “did you just now pour that coffee into your saucer before drinking?”

“To cool it,” answered Jefferson. “My throat is not made of brass.”

“Even so,” rejoined Washington, “we pour our legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it.”

The party in power rarely wants to “cool it” when that means getting less of what its members want.

For instance, Democrats controlled the Senate for the last four years. For two of those years, the Senate had what would have been a partisan deadlocked 50-50 split when you count all the people who were either elected or caucused with the Republicans and the Democrats. The deadlock was avoided because of a quirk of the U.S. Constitution called the vice presidency.

Early in President Joe Biden’s term, the only thing that gave his party a working majority was Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking power. Her added vote gave Democrats organizational control of the Senate on committees and leadership and allowed them to approve controversial nominees and pass many bills. Harris was able to cast a record number of vice presidential tiebreaking votes, 33, during her four years in office.

During those four years in power, with narrow control, Senate Democrats chafed at limits imposed by the filibuster. They expressed a nearly unanimous willingness and proposed legislation, to use that deadlock-plus-tiebreaker, to narrow or outright scrap the practice.

For instance, the vast majority of Senate Democrats were willing to scrap the filibuster to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and related legislation. Only the defection of now-retired independent Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and their subsequent alienation from the Senate Democratic Caucus paused those ambitions.

Nevertheless, Senate Democrats in the November elections were determined to scrap the filibuster if they again retained control of the chamber and Harris won the White House. For her part, Harris called for scrapping the filibuster to enshrine abortion rights in national law after the Supreme Court weighed in.

“I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe,” Harris said in a Wisconsin Public Radio interview. “And get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back into law the protections for reproductive freedom.”

This drew a sharp rebuke from Manchin. “Shame on her,” he said. “She knows the filibuster is the Holy Grail of democracy. It’s the only thing that keeps us talking and working together. If she gets rid of that, then this would be the House on steroids.”

When the election broke against Democrats, they mostly passed the issue over in silence.

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Now, there is pressure for Senate Republicans to end the filibuster to pass more of their favored legislation over Democratic procedural objections since they have a solid majority of 53-47. President Donald Trump, for his part, has advocated an end to it, calling it “very outdated.”

New Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) appears more determined to play the long game for a future when the GOP can find itself out of power again. He has promised to retain the filibuster, saying that it has had “perhaps the greatest impact in preserving the Founders’ vision of the Senate.”

Jeremy Lott is the author of The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency.