The Filibuster

August 12, 2021

Imagine you’re designing a scheduling scheme for the CPU in your computer. Or in another abstraction, you’re attempting to run multiple programs on your computer. (The computer architecture analogy works well when dealing with systems that need to be optimized because CPU schedulers and computers in general have been optimized both on a heuristic and mathematical level. They are great examples of engineers and theorists doing amazing work.) In both of these scenarios, we have an entity that needs to manage multiple tasks. Some tasks may be of high priority, but for now each tasks needs to get done and progress relatively evenly. Now lets say one task holds on to this processing entity indefinitely because it does not want the others tasks to progress. Your computer is now frozen. Lets now explore the possibilities of why this task would freeze your computer. One possible reason of why your computer is now frozen is because the other tasks are actually malware and were going to damage your computer. We would then thank the task that froze your computer as it was protecting you. A different possibility is that this freezing task is actually the malware, and wanted to freeze your computer to halt your work. In either scenario, a corrupt task was let into your queue. This is more of a problem involving the input security of your computer and not the process scheduler. Now how does this translate to the United State’s Congress?

Many claim that the filibuster is a protection for democracy. ()()()()(). Be that assumes that the people in Congress need to sometimes be de-activated in order to preserve and protect democracy.