Sorry, Mitch, the filibuster has outlived its usefulness
At his first White House news conference Thursday, President Joe Biden said he agreed with former President Barack Obama that the filibuster is “a relic of the Jim Crow era.” I disagree. How can you have a “relic” of something that’s still going on? The facts also disagree with Kentucky Republican and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who took my breath away Tuesday when he said the filibuster “has no racial history at all. None. There’s no dispute among historians about that.”
Fortunately, his office later walked that statement back, saying McConnell was referring only to the origins of the filibuster, not its later wellknown history.
What’s a filibuster? The word, rooted interestingly in a Dutch word for piracy, is a delaying tactic by which one or more senators block the progress of legislation and hold it hostage through seemingly endless debate until concessions are won from the majority. The Senate’s cloture rule requires 60 members to end debate on most issues and move to a vote.
An overview on the Senate’s own website explains how the filibuster “proved to be particularly useful to Southern senators who sought to block civil rights legislation, including anti-lynching bills. Not until 1964 did the Senate successfully overcome a filibuster to pass a major civil rights bill.”
That was the time, McConnell surely remembers, when the 1964 Civil Rights Act and then the 1965 Voting Rights Act brought an end to Jim Crow, the legally segregated “white” and “colored” restrooms, water fountains and voting laws that had been in place since the fall of Reconstruction.
Yet, the fight for voting rights didn’t end. We hear many echoes of it today in the new wave of Republican efforts to suppress the vote, including a new sweeping law signed by Georgia’s Gov. Brian Kemp on Thursday — the same day as Biden’s news conference, in which he called such laws “un-American.”
Among other changes, the Georgia law requires a photo ID in order to vote absentee by mail, reduces the time people have to request an absentee ballot, and limits where ballot drop boxes can be placed and when they can be accessed. Shades of Jim Crow. This time it’s just a little more subtle.
“What I’m worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It’s sick. It’s sick,” Biden said, citing such questionable new rules as a ban on providing water to voters standing in long lines to vote.
That’s why my own support for the right to filibuster, like Biden’s, has weakened. I still believe that our republic works best when lawmakers find ways to meet somewhere in the happy middle for the benefit of all Americans. Ah, yes, I have a dream. But reality keeps getting in the way.
Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois called on fellow Democrats to fix the problem, as Biden suggested, by some reform, such as requiring those who want to filibuster to stand up and talk until they run out of steam. But crafty McConnell has angrily threatened “a completely scorched earth Senate” if Democrats try to make it easier to pass legislation. Gee, no wonder he feels threatened. Without the filibuster, Democrats might actually be able to get their agenda passed.
It is always better to work out political conflicts and reach healthy compromise. But, after the partisan gridlock we have now, it’s hard to imagine how much worse a post-filibuster Senate could get.
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