Basically, the legislative filibuster allows 41 Senators to kill legislation.
In its original form, the filibuster required a senator (or senators) to literally speak until he (and at that time, it was always “he”) either dropped from exhaustion or the bill was tabled. Not having a procedural mechanism to end debate got cumbersome and time consuming. So, in the early 1900s, the “cloture” vote was created to end debate – and therefore any individual filibuster. Cloture requires 60 votes.
Today we don’t require the physical exercise of taking the floor (which in practice isn’t logistically difficult if multiple senators are involved, and just keeps the Senate from doing any business), but the cloture vote is still critical – and is why conversations about filibusters often center on the number 60.
And that is why it takes 60 votes – not 50 – to move legislation in the Senate.
The Democrats currently have no plans to try to kill the filibuster altogether—they do not have the votes, as Joe Manchin (D-WV) has openly opposed the idea and others are leery—but they want to keep the threat of killing it to prevent McConnell and the Republicans from abusing it and stopping all Democratic legislation. https://itstarts.today/how-un-democratic-is-the-filibuster/
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