This is only true because the Senate’s floor time is valuable enough that leadership would rather move on to consider other bills than waste time on a real filibuster. The “silent filibuster” is not an official part of Senate rules.

People have been saying that Congress is gridlocked and ineffective, and that is true, by several subjective and objective measures. But even in the gridlocked state there are still a bunch of bills that are debated and passed. And it takes floor time to work on those.

From The Wiki:

Congress can pass up to three reconciliation bills per year, with each bill addressing the major topics of reconciliation: revenue, spending, and the federal debt limit. However, if Congress passes a reconciliation bill affecting more than one of those topics, it cannot pass another reconciliation bill later in the year affecting one of the topics addressed by the previous reconciliation bill.[3] In practice, reconciliation bills have usually been passed once per year at most.[16]

Edit: Are you saying the Senate and House made two identical budget resolutions in this year? Or is it just that Senate Republicans don’t want to blow reconciliation for the next year on what is probably mostly continuing resolution?

Everything that says 51 can be read as 50 plus VP,.

There is a rule that the reconciliation bill can pass on 51. But there are two main limits on reconciliation:

1. Reconciliation has to be at least nominally about the budget, as you said, and

2. Only one reconciliation bill per fiscal year.

The Republicans already shot their reconciliation shot with the BBB. They can’t do it again until the next fiscal year (which arrives tomorrow, so they can get started).

Adding this because I don’t see it explained anywhere else:

It takes 60/100 votes to pass the budget bills in the Senate, instead of 51, because the Senate still has a filibuster. The minority Democrats have the power to stop the vote from coming up by simply talking on the floor forever until the Republicans give up and go home.

The 53-47 vote was for a cloture motion, which is to put time limits on debate on a particular budget bill. The rules don’t let Dems filibuster the cloture motion for obvious reasons, so that vote happened. But it takes 60 votes to pass cloture, so it went down.

Now, there are some resolutions that don’t involve coming to a compromise:

• the Democrats could choose not to do the filibuster. Then the bill would come up, and they could all vote against it, but it could pass on 53 votes.
• the Senate could change the rules to get rid of filibuster. This is usually called the “nuclear option” because it removes the 60 vote barrier using a rules vote that only needs 51 to pass. The procedure is to make someone actually start a filibuster, then raise a point of order that filibustering member is taking too long. The Parliamentarian will deny the point of order based on the current rules, but that can be appealed to the whole Senate on a majority vote. And the point of order is not debatable.