The McConnell filibuster is not the same as the Jim Crow filibuster – it's much worse
President Obama chooses his words carefully. So last July, when he punctuated his eulogy to the civil rights legend John Lewis by calling the Senate filibuster “another relic of Jim Crow”, he wasn’t messing around.
Many others (myself included) had written about the historical link between the Senate rule allowing a minority of lawmakers to kill a bill and the preservation of white supremacy. But Obama’s speech sparked a wholesale rebranding. Today, among progressive politicians and activists alike, “End the filibuster” is out. “End the Jim Crow filibuster” is in.
Yet those who so bluntly tie Senate obstruction to southern segregation are missing an important piece of historical context. It’s not fair to suggest that the filibuster championed by defenders of Jim Crow decades ago is identical to the filibuster championed by Mitch McConnell today. Because today’s filibuster – McConnell’s filibuster – is actually much worse.
To understand how the filibuster became essential, first to southern Democrats and then later to nearly all Republicans, we have to start a little more than 100 years ago. Until 1917, the filibuster allowed any group of legislators, no matter how small, to pass speaking privileges among themselves, holding the Senate floor and indefinitely delaying any bill. But when Senate obstruction threatened to derail America’s military buildup ahead of the first world war, lawmakers changed the rules, allowing a supermajority of senators to break a filibuster and force a vote.
Overnight, the Senate’s balance of power shifted. Tiny handfuls of legislators were now powerless. But blocs of legislators - a few dozen senators willing to grind the body to a halt – could still derail nearly any piece of legislation by denying it an up-or-down vote. One cause in particular lacked majority support, yet consistently rallied a sizeable and passionate coalition: opposition to civil rights.
Thus, and largely by accident, 1917 was the start of what can rightfully be called the Jim Crow filibuster. For decades, not a single civil rights bill survived southern Democratic obstruction. Occasionally, Senate leaders would introduce such a bill, fail to overcome segregationist obstruction and then withdraw it. More often, though, senators wouldn’t seriously consider civil rights at all. Rather than encourage “the world’s greatest deliberative body” to debate the issue, the filibuster functioned as a kind of gag rule. Since ending segregation was dead on arrival, why even bring it up?
The Jim Crow filibuster had one obvious effect on the country – protecting white supremacy – but it also had two more subtle effects on the Senate itself. First, by forcing senators to ignore the country’s single most contentious issue, the gag rule created a cherished, albeit disingenuous, sense of decorum. With America’s fiercest battleground off limits, senators felt free to focus on common ground instead. Second, because the majority of senators didn’t want to legitimize Jim Crow’s most effective delaying tactic, they almost never used it. Precisely because civil rights bills were always filibustered, other bills were almost always not.
For much of the 20th century, then,