Cloture?
Couldn't a supermajority of Senators have voted to limit debate? Even if the petition for cloture is ignored for a day, the threat of cloture should still have influenced the plot, right?
shareYes...but then we would not have had a classic movie.
It's fun to take this seriously for a moment and speculate on the reasons the Senators would NOT invoke cloture. They may have been enjoying making sport of Mr. Smith too much. Some of them may have turned against Paine and Taylor by the time a vote for cloture was called. And the VP (Harry Carey) was portrayed as having such a high degree of probity that those sheep-in-Senate-clothing may simply have been waiting to take his lead -- and he was the most sympathetic man in the room.
But you certainly are correct.
You just keep throwing your feathers, mister, before I put you in a hospital.