Abolishing the Filibuster Is About Power, Not Anti-Racism

[Muda69]

https://reason.com/2021/03/26/abolishing-the-filibuster-is-about-power-not-anti-racism/

Quote

As the Senate majority prepared to abolish the filibuster in order to advance its political agenda, a long-tenured member of the chamber issued a stern warning.

"We should make no mistake. This nuclear option is ultimately an example of the arrogance of power. It is a fundamental power-grab by the majority party," then-Sen. Joe Biden (D–Del.) said during a speech delivered on May 23, 2005, from the Senate floor.

Calling it "the single most significant" vote he would cast in more than three decades as a member of the Senate, Biden admonished Republicans for trying to blow up the filibuster to get judicial nominees confirmed with a simple majority. "Folks who want to see this change want to eliminate one of the procedural mechanisms designed for the express purpose of guaranteeing individual rights and they also, as a consequence, would undermine the protections of the minority point of view in the heat of majority excess," he said.

The times, they sure have changed.

During a Thursday press conference, now-President Joe Biden indicated publicly what he has reportedly been saying behind closed doors for a while: that the Senate's filibuster rules should be changed—perhaps even abolished, allowing legislation to pass with a simple majority, though he continues to hedge on that point.

"It's being abused in a gigantic way," Biden said of the filibuster, before suggesting that the Senate ought to return to the pre-1971 rules that required senators to actually stand on the floor and speak if they wanted to prevent a vote on a bill.

But, moments later, Biden suggested that he'd be willing to go further if the Senate's Republican minority blocks the passage of legislation—including a possible $3 trillion infrastructure bill, a gun control bill, and other progressive agenda items. "If there's complete lockdown and chaos as a consequence of the filibuster, then we'll have to go beyond what I'm talking about," he said.

Far from being a procedural mechanism meant to protect individual rights and guard against the tyranny of the majority, Biden says he now agrees with former President Barack Obama that the Senate's filibuster rules are "a relic of the Jim Crow era"—a line that has become the go-to explanation for progressives who would like to see the 60-vote requirement swept aside. (Obama, by the way, also defended the filibuster during the 2005 debate over the so-called nuclear option.)

But the history of the filibuster predates the Jim Crow era by several decades. In fact, the filibuster was accidentally invented by none other than America's first political villain: Aaron Burr. As vice president in 1805, Burr suggested that the Senate abolish a rule that allowed a simple majority to cut off debate on a bill. That same rule—technically a "motion to previous question"—still exists in the House today. Without that rule, however, the Senate could not pass any bill until every senator agreed to move forward.

That's an untenable arrangement for obvious reasons. The Senate used a variety of different mechanisms to stop debate and allow a vote over the years, but the current system of invoking "cloture"—the thing that requires 60 votes today, even though the number was originally higher—dates back to 1917.

The idea that the filibuster is a holdover from the Jim Crow era—an idea that is suddenly popping up all over left-wing politics and media—stems from the fact that filibusters were relatively rare until the past few decades. "It was used rarely and almost always for the purpose of blocking civil-rights bills," explains New York magazine's Jonathan Chait. "The filibuster exception to the general practice of majority rule was a product of an implicit understanding that the white North would grant the white South a veto on matters of white supremacy."

There is no question that the filibuster has been wielded for racist purposes. Sen. Strom Thurmond (D–S.C.) spoke on the Senate floor for more than 24 hours—still the longest filibuster on record—in a failed attempt to block a final vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1957, for example. The bill passed anyway.

But the filibuster is better understood as the product of the Senate's arcane procedural rules. As such, it is not inherently racist (and, by extension, abolishing it won't make the Senate as an institution anti-racist). If it was used by racists to advance racist goals, the racists are to blame. Presidents have used the annual State of the Union address to advance all manner of terrible policy, but we rightfully blame them (and the Congress that eventually votes to enact such policies) and not the speech itself.

The debate over the filibuster, like all of the tedious debates over procedural mechanisms in legislative chambers, is really about power. That power can manifest itself in the perpetuation of racist and discriminatory systems, of course, but not exclusively.

"Short-term, pragmatic considerations almost always shape contests over reform of Senate rules," Sarah Binder, a historian and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration last year. She was referring to the history of the filibuster and its evolution over the decades, but the same lesson applies to what's happening right now.

Today, the filibuster is also something of a scapegoat. As James Wallner, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute, wrote for Reason in January, there are plenty of other ways for the minority to use the Senate's rules to hold up legislation. Abolishing the filibuster will merely change the dynamics of this debate, but it won't end it.

The better question to be asked is whether allowing the Senate to pass bills with a simple majority would improve government. Considering that Democrats are trying to shove it out of the way to speed through questionably constitutional gun control bills and even more spending, it's difficult for anyone who believes in limited government to cheer the filibuster's potential demise. But this is a debate that requires clarity, not misplaced accusations of racism.

For what it's worth, Biden and the Democratic minority won the debate over the filibuster in 2005. A bipartisan group of senators—the Gang of 14 led by then-Sens. John McCain (R–Ariz.) and Ben Nelson (D–Neb.)—reached a deal in which the Republican members agreed not to deploy the nuclear option while Democratic members agreed not to block confirmation votes for future judicial nominees.

It was an agreement that held up until 2013, when Democrats nuked the judicial filibuster to push through some of Obama's picks. When Republicans retook control of the Senate in 2014, they happily used the new rules to push through dozens of conservative appointees to the federal bench—something that Democrats and progressives now routinely complain about.

There's a lesson here for Democrats in 2021. Nuking the legislative filibuster—especially when you have a majority so slim that a single election could flip control of the Senate back to the GOP—seems like a decision Democrats will regret sooner rather than later.

It's a lesson Biden should know well.

"Whenever you're in the majority, it's frustrating to see the other side block a bill or a nominee you support. I've walked in your shoes. And I get it," Biden said in that same 2005 speech. "There's one thing I've learned in my years here. Once you change the rules and surrender the Senate's institutional power, you never get it back."

Agreed.  The filibuster needs to stay.  But if the Democrats succeed is having it banned then they will rue the day the did it.

 

[DanteEstonia]

6 hours ago, Muda69 said:

https://reason.com/2021/03/26/abolishing-the-filibuster-is-about-power-not-anti-racism/

Agreed.  The filibuster needs to stay.  But if the Democrats succeed is having it banned then they will rue the day the did it.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/03/18/100-years-filibuster-has-been-used-deny-black-rights/

Quote

For 100 years, the filibuster has been used to deny Black rights

The most significant impact of the Senate’s supermajority rules

By Magdalene Zier and John Fabian Witt

March 18, 2021 at 6:00 a.m. PDT

Simmering debate on the future of the filibuster has increased further now that President Biden has endorsed proposals to force senators who filibuster to hold the Senate floor, in the hopes that the exhausting ritual will diminish the number of filibusters obstructing legislation. The stakes are high, given that a voting rights bill looms in the near future. But even proponents of change who point to the filibuster’s long history of hindering civil rights measures leave out a crucial and gruesome chapter in the making of the modern filibuster.

The most famous such use of the filibuster was against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Opponents of the Act filibustered for a record-breaking 60 working days. Millions of Americans watched as CBS’s Roger Mudd reported live from the steps of the Capitol on white Southern senators’ efforts to kill the legislation.

But the modern filibuster’s first civil rights fatality actually occurred decades earlier in the searing 1922 defeat of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. The Senate’s abandonment of this landmark legislation in the history of anti-Black violence is little remembered today, but it set a path for partisan and ideological battles in the century since and continues to reverberate in our legal system.

Lynch mobs murdered more than 4,000 Black people between the end of Reconstruction and the middle of the 20th century. Activists such as Ida B. Wells and organizations such as the NAACP worked to expose the savagery of lynching, to debunk the pervasive myth that lynch mobs avenged the rape of white women and to revive public and legislative concern for Black lives for the first time since the retreat from Reconstruction. Anti-Black violence had risen to grim peaks during the horrific Red Summer of 1919. The deadliest race riot erupted in Elaine, Ark., where 500 heavily armed soldiers, local law enforcement and white vigilantes killed hundreds of Black sharecroppers who had dared to join forces in the sale of the year’s valuable cotton crop.

Resurrecting the GOP’s history as the party of Lincoln and Reconstruction, a contingent of liberal Republicans renewed what had been a sporadic push for anti-lynching legislation. Rep. Leonidas Dyer’s (R-Mo.) anti-lynching proposal was the most ambitious to date. The bill would have empowered the federal government to prosecute private actors who participated in lynchings and fine counties that failed to prevent the violence. In the wake of the Republican electoral sweep in 1920, Dyer garnered support from his House colleagues and the Senate Judiciary Committee. President Warren G. Harding seemed to offer support, too, even if lukewarm. The Dyer Bill passed in the House on Jan. 26, 1922. The NAACP — barely a decade old — claimed the passage as a great legislative victory.

Despite this substantial backing, the bill ultimately died a procedural death at the hands of a filibuster led by Southern Democrats. Indeed, the Dyer Bill drama inaugurated a new era for the legislative tactic. Filibusters had been largely ineffective until the 1880s, when politicians from both sides of the aisle began to use them successfully to delay or amend disfavored legislation. White Southerners in particular saw the tactical utility of the maneuver, invoking it to block a voting rights bill in 1891. But after anti-militarists led by Sen. Robert La Follette of Wisconsin used a filibuster to block President Woodrow Wilson’s proposal to arm merchant ships against German U-boat attacks during World War I, the Senate moved to adopt a new parliamentary policy. The rule of “cloture,” adopted in 1917, enabled a two-thirds vote to close debate and overcome the antics of a determined minority.

The Dyer Bill put the new cloture mechanism to its first great test. For the first time, noted The Washington Post, “filibusters frankly avowed that they were filibustering.” The New York Times explained the “novelty” of the Dyer Bill blockade: “Never has the Senate so openly advertised the impotence to which it is reduced by its antiquated rules of procedure.” Small-town newspapers shared The Post’s and Times’s surprise at the filibusterers’ method. A Sumter, S.C., paper chronicled what Senate aides had dubbed, “the most scientifically conducted filibuster.”

The Dyer Bill filibuster was highly theatrical. Senators schemed strategies to delay the debate, stretching routine parliamentary procedures into lengthy ordeals. Members read stacks of books, pamphlets and newspapers to their colleagues, sometimes for as long as eight hours. In papers across the country, the public expressed a common shock that a single procedural rule could “prevent a legislative body from legislating.”

Ultimately, the new cloture rule failed to rescue anti-lynching legislation. On Dec. 2, 1922, Republicans surrendered. Leading Republicans such as Sen. William Borah of Idaho refused to vote to invoke cloture, citing objections to the bill’s constitutionality. In truth, the party had been preparing for the bill’s defeat from the beginning. Committed reformers like Dyer aside, many Republicans had supported the bill to court Black voters in the November midterm elections. Years later, a cynical Borah would brag to W.E.B. Du Bois that the Dyer Bill fiasco had been “one of the finest illustrations of how we played politics with the negro that I know of.”

Civil rights leaders seethed. The NAACP’s magazine commented bitterly that the bill “was not killed by a majority vote but was lynched by a filibuster.” The organization’s leader, James Weldon Johnson, charged that responsibility for the bill’s collapse rested “equally with the Republican majority” as with the “lynching tactics of the Democrats.” The filibuster, he continued, was a “license to mobs to lynch unmolested.” And in fact, in the eight days following the bill’s collapse, vigilantes lynched another four Black Americans.

In defeating the Dyer Bill, Southern Democrats honed the filibuster as a weapon against civil rights reform. Many of the same Southern White senators filibustered again in the 1930s to block the Costigan-Wagner Anti-Lynching Act, even though this time the bill’s sponsors were members of Southerners’ own party.

Such early obstructionism proved to be rehearsals for 1964 and other civil rights showdowns. Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) spoke for a record 24 hours to stall the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The version of the act that eventually succeeded was significantly watered down, lacking critical enforcement provisions. Even as recently as last year, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) conducted a one-man blockade against a 21st century attempt to enact a new version of the federal anti-lynching law the House first passed a century ago.

The Dyer Bill episode also shaped civil rights advocates’ strategies in the century to come. The failure of key Republicans to fight the filibuster was an early sign that the party would abandon its historic civil rights platform, leading a small but important contingent of Black Americans to leave the party. In the 1924 presidential campaign, influential Black leaders threw their support to La Follette, the Progressive Party candidate. Fatefully, the experience of failure in the electoral arena also turned civil rights politics away from legislation and toward the courts. A few months after the Dyer Bill failed in the Senate, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the outrageous criminal conviction of Black defendants in a case arising out of the Elaine massacre. (No whites had been prosecuted.) The Court seemed poised to do what Congress would not.

For decades thereafter, organizations such as the NAACP would take the lesson to heart — for better and for worse. On one hand, the shift in strategy led to Brown v. Board of Education and the ruling that mandatory segregation was illegal. On the other hand, the legal institutions in which civil rights advocates invested their energies would also prove woefully inadequate in delivering racial equality in the United States.

The first modern filibusterers transformed a procedural tactic into a powerful tool for entrenching white supremacy and thwarting progress. Critics at the time angrily and correctly labeled the stagnant 1922 legislature the “Do-Nothing Congress.” When assessing their fealty to the filibuster today, senators from both parties should be wary of earning the same epithet.

And just to pre-empt an argument-

 

[Muda69]

4 minutes ago, DanteEstonia said:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/03/18/100-years-filibuster-has-been-used-deny-black-rights/

And just to pre-empt an argument-

 

Can say that the only use for the filibuster has been to "deny Black rights"?

And nice to see you have that old video bookmarked. You must lull yourself to sleep at night while playing it..............