[Editor's Note — In the original posting, Strom Thurmond was identified as a Republican senator when he made his record-setting filibuster in 1957. However, he was a Democrat at the time and didn't switch parties until the 88th Congress in 1963.]

Picture if you can US senator Harry Reid donning the garb of a swashbuckling buccaneer in the anticipated volley on the Senate floor between Democrats and Republicans over President Bush's judicial nominations. To a 19th century Mexican or Nicaraguan, it might make sense.

It's a stretch, but here's why.

Senate Majority Leader Frist and a fleet of Republicans are squaring off against Reid and the Democrats who are setting up ramparts in a battle over senate procedure at the least, if not the interpretation of the Constitution itself.

The Democrats’ line of defense is the "filibuster," a long-standing Senate privilege allowing virtually unlimited floor debate usually in the hopes of killing legislation, or, in this case, blocking the approval of Bush's nominees to the bench.

In the mid 1800s, according to the Senate Historical Office, “filibuster -- from a Dutch word meaning 'pirate' -- became popular in the 1850s, when it was applied to efforts to hold the Senate floor in order to prevent a vote on a bill."

There’s a little more to the definition, though.

The United States, officially only a little over 50 years old by then, had an ever-growing population and territory. In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson had paid France the equivalent of $193 million in today’s dollars for over 828,000 acres of land west of the Mississippi—the Louisiana Purchase.

As often happens, expansion brings conflict, and the United States is no more immune from it than other nations. The larger the territory, the larger the national interests, and so as US governments and their presidents sought to secure these lands, the people who felt their own entitlements to it often felt differently.

Enter "filibuster."

The word filibuster comes directly from the Spanish filibustero, itself from the Dutch Vrijbuiter, or freebooter, plunderer—a pirate. “It was used,” says Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to Congress “to describe US military adventurers who in the mid-1800s fomented insurrections against various Latin American governments.”

With some irony,

The first parliamentary use of the word is said to have occurred in the House [of Representatives] in 1853, when a representative accused his opponents of “filibustering against the United States.” Ten years later, “filibuster had come to mean delaying action on the floor, but the term did not gain wide currency until the 1880s.

Again—unlike in the House—the filibuster tradition has allowed senators essentially unlimited debate. Which means talking. You can employ other techniques requiring parliamentary skills and knowhow, but, says the CQ guide, “The most important tool of the filibusterer, once control of the floor proceedings is gained, is continued talk.” Lots of it.

So who holds the record? In August of 1957, in an a failed effort to impede passage of the civil rights bill, a Republican senator from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond, held the floor for 24 hours and 18 minutes. Non-stop.

Also . . .

House and Senate Rules of Procedure: A Comparison (Congressional Research Service, via Senate.gov)

Everything you wanted to know about the "nuclear option (Salon.com)

With a Potential Supreme Court Nomination At Stake, Questions of The Filibuster's Constitutionality Linger (FindLaw.com)

Can the Senate Bind Itself So that Only a Supermajority Can Change Its Rules? (FindLaw.com)

"Filibuster and Cloture": an interview with former Senate parliamentarian Floyd Riddick (Senate.gov)

Senate leaders to break bread on Sunday(TheHill.com)

Rove Guided Career of Judicial Nominee in Filibuster Fight (New York Times)