Effectively having 2 Houses of Representatives is how Congress was set up by the Constitution.
In reality, the fillibuster was created by accident.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/impact-filibuster-federal-policymaking/
There is a stubborn myth that the filibuster is part of the Founders’ vision of government.1 However, not only does the U.S. Constitution make no mention of the filibuster, it also appears to assume that legislative decisions would be made by majority vote.2 The evidence suggests that the filibuster arose not out of any founding principles but instead out of “tenuous precedents and informal practices.”3
In fact, for much of early U.S. history, the Senate operated essentially by majority rule. Until 1806, a Senate rule allowed a simple majority to end debate on a bill and move to a vote.4 And when that rule was eliminated, in 1806, it appears that it was by mistake—senators were merely cleaning up their rulebook, on the advice of Vice President Aaron Burr, and did not realize that they had opened the door to unlimited obstruction.5 The first filibuster did not occur until more than 30 years later in 1837.6
The term filibuster entered use even later, in the 1850s, when it described the practice of senators giving lengthy speeches to delay a vote on a bill.7 Still, the filibuster was not commonly used—”in general, legislation passed by majority rule.”8 One reason may have been that, in order to sustain a filibuster, senators had to actually stand on the Senate floor and continue to speak—not an easy exercise to maintain indefinitely. When senators did so, it served more to delay legislation than to defeat it. In fact, “almost every filibustered measure before 1880 was eventually passed.”9
The modern-day filibuster is largely the product of two significant reforms: one in 1917 and another in 1974. During World War I, before the United States had entered the war, a group of 11 senators filibustered a bill that would have armed American merchant ships to protect them from attacks by German U-boats.10 Shortly thereafter, President Woodrow Wilson made a statement, published in The New York Times, stating that “[t]he Senate of the United States is the only legislative body in the world which cannot act when its majority is ready for action.”11 Referring to the 11 senators as “a little group of willful men,” Wilson stated, “The only remedy is that the rules of the Senate shall be so altered that it can act.”12
There had never been more than five filibusters in a single year prior to 1966, but there were 10 each year from 1971 to 1973 and 18 filibusters in 1974. There were 218(!) cloture votes in 2013-14. NOBODY ever envisioned that the Senate should work this way. Consider that the 21 states with the fewest residents, who collectively have enough Senators to filibuster legislation, make up only 11 percent of the total population. The 21 least-populous states currently represented by two Republican senators—enough to sustain a filibuster—represent less than 25 percent of the U.S. population.
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