And just enough republicans voted for it to pass it. Isn’t that convenient.
"In 1975 the Democratic-controlled Senate[5] revised its cloture rule so that three-fifths of the senators sworn (usually 60 senators) could limit debate, except on votes to change Senate rules, which require two-thirds to invoke cloture.[19][20]
The Senate experimented with a rule to remove the need to speak on the floor to filibuster ("talking filibuster"), thus allowing for "virtual filibusters".[21]
Another type of filibuster used in the Senate, the post-cloture filibuster (using points of order to consume time, since they are not counted as part of the limited time provided for debate), was eliminated as an effective delay technique by a rule change in 1979.[22][23][24]"