Former President Barack Obama gave a passionate and deeply political tribute to the late Representative John Lewis (D-GA) at Lewis’s funeral on Thursday. Lewis was one of the nation’s top civil rights leaders beginning in the 1960s, and Obama spoke of how, even when he was very young, Lewis suffered beatings and other acts of violence to advance the cause of voting rights. of African Americans.
Obama called for legislation to reinstate the Voting Rights Act, much of which was gutted by Supreme Court decisions in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and Abbott v. Perez (2018) He also supported other democratic reforms, including the end of partisan gerrymandering, extending statehood to Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico, and making Election Day a national holiday.
And then he asked the Senate to remove an obstacle that has consistently stood in the way of civil rights legislation throughout American history.
“If all of this requires eliminating the filibuster, another Jim Crow relic, to secure the rights God gives to every American, then that’s what we should do,” Obama said.
The filibuster generally allows a bloc of 41 senators to prevent passage of the legislation, and Republican filibusters hampered much of Obama’s political agenda during his presidency.
A common measure used to measure the frequency with which filibusters occur is the number of “cut” motions filed by the majority to break a filibuster. The number of such clothing movements more than doubled after Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) became the Republican Senate leader in 2007, and McConnell continued to use the filibuster aggressively after Obama took office two years later.
Obama has criticized the widespread use of the filibuster in the past. He told Vox’s Ezra Klein in 2015 that the Senate should eliminate “routine filibuster use in the Senate,” for example. But Obama’s comments at Lewis’s funeral, in which he not only opposed the filibuster, but also pointed to the role he played in preserving Jim Crow, is probably his strongest statement in opposition to the filibuster to date.
The filibuster is a historical accident that became a tool for white supremacy.
The same filibuster predates Jim Crow and was created entirely by accident. In 1805, shortly after killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel, Vice President Aaron Burr returned to the Senate to deliver a farewell address and suggested that the Senate make changes to its rules. Burr proposed eliminating the “pre-question motion,” a process rarely used before his speech, and the Senate followed Burr’s advice in 1806.
But the motion of the previous question was not superfluous. In fact, this motion was the only process that allowed the Senate to cut the debate among members. No one recognized Burr’s mistake for 35 years, until 1841, when the first filibuster occurred. Without a way to end the debate, rebel senators could delay Senate action indefinitely by insisting on “debating” a proposal forever.
Since then, the Senate has changed the rules many times to make it easier to break a filibuster, but most legislation cannot yet be ignored unless 60 senators join to invoke duress. That means that, unless Democrats win an absolutely overwhelming majority in November (they would have to get 13 seats in the Senate, an almost impossible feat), Republicans will be able to block almost any voting rights bill through the filibuster.
Unless, of course, the filibuster is eliminated, something the Senate could do at any time with just 51 votes.
If Republicans used the filibuster to stop legislation that expands voting rights, they would join a long and inglorious tradition of illiberal senators filtering civil rights legislation. From 1875 to 1957, Congress did not enact a single civil rights bill, even when Jim Crow flourished in the south.
Congress could not even pass civil rights legislation that had the support of the majority. Between the end of World War II and 1957, when a modest bill was finally signed into law, the House passed five civil rights bills. But white supremacist senators were able to block each of these five bills using the filibuster.
Democrats appear to be turning sharply against the filibuster
It took Democrats more than four harrowing years to realize how severely the filibuster had hampered his ability to govern while Obama was president, and even then they only made modest reforms to the filibuster, allowing most presidential nominees to be confirmed with only 51 votes, but leaving the legislative filibuster largely intact.
In fact, just a few years ago, much of the Democratic group seemed committed to maintaining the filibuster. In April 2017, Senators Chris Coons (D-DE) and Susan Collins (R-ME) organized a letter calling on the Senate leadership to “preserve existing rules, practices, and traditions” that allow senators to filter legislation. More than two dozen Democrats joined this letter, and a total of 61 senators signed it.
And yet even Coons, once one of the Senate’s most outspoken opponents of eliminating the filibuster, is now singing a different tune. “I will not stand idly by for four years and I will see the Biden administration’s initiatives blocked at every turn,” Coons told Politico in June. “I will try to find a way forward that does not require removing what remains of the structural railings, but if there is a Biden administration, it will inherit a disaster, at home and abroad.” It requires urgent and effective action. “
Similarly, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden recently expressed his support for the elimination of the filibuster if Senate Republicans are too “disruptive.”
In other words, there is a very real chance that the incoming Senate will have 51 votes to eliminate the filibuster, or at least reduce it enough to allow voting rights legislation to become law. Whether Democrats gain control of the federal government, the chances of such a law becoming a reality will almost certainly depend on whether Senate Democrats are willing to attack the filibuster.
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