Eliminate the Filibuster

[homersapien 11,416]

We are at "a fundamental crossroads in American politics".  Failure to do so will put our democracy at severe risk.

 

The Decision That Will Define Democrats for a Decade

Will they get rid of the filibuster if it means passing their voting-rights and election-reform agenda?

Ronald Brownstein, January 28, 2021

No decision facing Democrats over the next two years will shape the long-term political competition between the parties more than whether they end the Senate filibuster to pass their agenda to reform elections and expand access to the vote.

The party’s immediate political fate in the 2022 and 2024 elections is likely to turn mostly on whether Joe Biden can successfully control the coronavirus outbreak—restarting the economy and returning a sense of normalcy to daily life. But the contours of American politics just over that horizon, through 2030 and beyond, will be determined even more by whether Democrats can establish new national standards for the conduct of elections through a revised Voting Rights Act and sweeping legislation known as H.R. 1, which would set nationwide voting rules, limit “dark money” campaign spending, and ban gerrymandering of congressional districts. With both bills virtually guaranteed to pass the House, as they did in the last Congress, their fate will likely turn on whether Senate Democrats are willing to end the filibuster to approve them over Republican opposition on a simple-majority vote.

That decision carries enormous consequences for the future balance of power between the parties: The number of younger and diverse voters participating in future elections will likely be much greater if these laws pass than if they don’t, especially with state-level Republicans already pushing a new round of laws making it tougher to vote based on Donald Trump’s discredited claims of election fraud in 2020. Given those stakes, the Democrats’ voting-rights agenda is quickly becoming a focal point of the pressure from left-leaning activists to end the filibuster. “Our grass roots will not accept the notion that we had good intentions, but we just failed” to pass these laws, Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, a Democrat who is the lead sponsor of the Senate companion to H.R. 1, told me.

These grassroots activists, who spurred the enormous turnout that propelled Democrats to unified control of Congress and the White House, are sending the same unambiguous message: Allowing GOP filibusters to kill the Democrats’ democracy-expansion agenda not only threatens to demobilize the party’s electoral base in upcoming elections, but also virtually ensures that Republican-leaning states will continue to erect barriers that dilute the long-term influence of the diverse younger generations now entering the electorate in large numbers.

The consequences will be “enormously catastrophic” if Democrats allow the next two years of unified control in Washington to expire without passing this part of their agenda, says Nsé Ufot, the chief executive officer of the New Georgia Project, a Stacey Abrams–founded group that helped power the Democratic victories in Georgia earlier this month that gave the party the Senate majority. Protecting the right to vote “is the antecedent civil right that we need to … shore up if we are going to have a fighting chance to win and defend any of the other rights that are important to the progressive activist wing of the Democratic Party,” Ufot told me.

Between them, the new VRA and H.R. 1 would create comprehensive new rules for federal elections. The new VRA is a direct response to the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County decision, which invalidated the original VRA’s central pillar: the requirement that states with a history of discrimination in voting receive “preclearance” from the Justice Department to make changes to their election laws that could disenfranchise minority voters.

That decision, backed by the Court’s five GOP-appointed justices over the opposition of the four Democratic appointees, functioned like a starting gun for the construction of new barriers to voting in Republican-controlled states. Following the party’s big gains in the 2010 election, red states had already begun advancing laws making it more difficult to vote, but after Shelby County that effort significantly intensified. In December 2019, every House Democrat voted to approve a new VRA that would restore the preclearance requirement and establish a new system for determining which states would be subject to it. (All but one House Republican opposed the bill.) But the legislation died when Mitch McConnell, then the Senate majority leader, refused to consider it.

If anything, the election-reform legislation that Democrats have introduced in both chambers—H.R. 1 and its Senate companion, S. 1—is even more ambitious. The bill, in fact, “may be more sweeping” than the original VRA, passed in 1965, Paul Smith, the vice president for litigation and strategy at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, told me. For federal elections, it would require every state to do the following: provide online, automatic, and same-day registration; ensure at least 15 days of in-person early voting; provide all voters access to no-excuse, postage-free absentee ballots; and offer drop boxes where they can return those ballots. It would also end gerrymandering by requiring every state to create independent commissions to draw congressional districts; establish a system of public financing for congressional elections; institute new safeguards against foreign interference in elections; and require increased disclosure of the unlimited dark-money campaign spending that was unleashed by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which like Shelby County was backed by the Court’s conservative majority. (It also endorses statehood for Washington, D.C., though a separate bill, which also passed the House in 2020, is required to actually implement that.)

In all, the legislation is, as Joe Biden once said to Barack Obama about the Affordable Care Act, a “big ******* deal.” Under current Senate rules, it is also doomed.

No House Democrat opposed H.R. 1 when it passed in 2019, and its sponsors are confident it’ll clear the House again, probably no later than early March. In the Senate, every Democrat co-sponsored the bill when it was first introduced in the last session, and Merkley told me he expects they all will sign on again. That means it will have at least 50 votes, enough for a majority with a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Kamala Harris.

But the legislation is certain to face a Republican filibuster. McConnell has excoriated it as “a radical half-baked socialist proposal” and an improper federal overreach into state prerogatives. Because McConnell has always been sensitive about being seen as racially biased, some Democrats think he might be hesitant to filibuster a new VRA, stepping into the shoes of southern segregationists like Senators Strom Thurmond and Richard Russell. (Ten Republicans might support the law even if he does, giving it enough votes to overcome any blockade.) But there’s little doubt McConnell and almost all Republicans would be more than comfortable filibustering the democracy-reform bill. “H.R. 1 is going to require an end of the filibuster,” Smith told me. “There is no way 10 Republicans are going to vote for [it].”

That means the fate of the democracy-reform legislation, and perhaps also the VRA if Republicans try to block that too, depends on whether Senate Democrats are willing to end the filibuster to pass it. That’s true of a lot of things Biden and the party want to do, such as immigration reform and new gun-control measures. But the electoral consequences of passing their election agenda may be greater than that of any other issue on their plate.

Three big factors are converging to raise the stakes for Democrats’ decision making on voting rights. The first is that the astonishingly large number of Republicans who supported Trump’s attempts to overturn the November election signals that GOP tolerance for antidemocratic measures is growing, and likely to increase in the years ahead. Already, legislators in an array of competitive states are employing Trump’s discredited claims of voter fraud to justify a new round of voting restrictions. In Georgia, Texas, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, for example, Republican officials want to roll back on-demand voting by mail, eliminate ballot drop boxes, and/or impose tighter voter-identification laws. One hundred and six bills to restrict voting access have been introduced this year in 28 states, the Brennan Center for Justice, which advocates for voting rights, reported this week.

The Republican campaign to block access to the vote “will probably get to a level that we haven’t seen since the 1960s, at least in some states,” Smith, who also teaches at Georgetown Law School, told me. Widespread Republican support for Trump’s efforts to subvert the election shows that “there has been this kind of validation of the idea [in the GOP] that we should win no matter what, and … that loops around and justifies more antidemocratic measures and voter suppression,” Smith said.

The second factor raising the stakes is the new 6–3 Republican majority on the Supreme Court. While Chief Justice John Roberts has displayed independence on some issues—with an eye toward protecting the Court’s public reputation—he has voted almost uniformly with the GOP’s preferences on questions related to the fundamental rules of elections (including Citizens United, Shelby County, and cases involving gerrymandering and voter purges). That’s convinced almost all the election-reform advocates I’ve spoken with that the Supreme Court won’t stand in the way of a new red-state offensive to restrict voter access; some recent opinions suggest that the Court’s Republican appointees might even try to block state supreme courts from resisting restrictive voter laws or extreme gerrymanders. “Courts are not the Democrats’ friend on voting rights,” Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the centrist New America think tank, told me.

Each of those dynamics is compounded by a third factor: the changing nature of the electorate—and of the Democratic coalition. Nonwhite and younger voters, the groups typically most disadvantaged by barriers to voting, will only become more important to Democrats in future elections. By 2024, Millennials and Generation Z, the two most racially diverse generations in American history, will significantly exceed the preponderantly white Baby Boomer and older generations as a share of eligible voters, according to projections by the nonpartisan States of Change project.

If Democrats don’t establish national standards for ballot access, the political influence of those diverse younger generations could be suppressed for years by restrictive state voting laws. That’s especially possible in states like Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and South Carolina. There, Republicans still maintain an advantage based on big margins among older and nonurban white voters, but they’re watching growing diversity in younger generations shave their edge.

For all these reasons, many experts in voting and elections believe that the choices Democrats make regarding their democracy and voting-reform agenda represent a fundamental crossroads in American politics. Passage of these laws wouldn’t guarantee a sustained period of Democratic political dominance: In both 2016 and 2020, Trump’s incredible mobilization of infrequent white voters demonstrated that Republicans could compete in a high-turnout environment. But failing to pass the laws might ensure the reverse: a lasting Democratic disadvantage. The absence of national election standards would further entrench the current system, which has allowed Republicans to frequently control Congress, the White House, or both during the past three decades, even though Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections.

If the Democrats don’t pass H.R. 1 and the new VRA, “there is a very good chance that America will wind up under an extended period of minority rule in which the party that represents 45–46 percent of the country can have a majority of power in Washington,” Drutman told me. “Which is not only fundamentally unfair, but it contravenes any set of democratic values and creates a sense of fundamental illegitimacy [that] is deeply destabilizing for a democracy.”

Merkley, the principal sponsor of the Senate companion bill, is no less emphatic. Especially with Trump’s efforts to subvert the election, the American vision of representative government has “slid over the cliff, and [it’s as if] we caught a root, and we are just holding on by our fingertips,” he told me. “We must find a way to pass this bill. It is our responsibility in our majority … to defend citizens’ rights to participate in our democracy. There is no other acceptable outcome.”

Still, passing the bill, and perhaps the new VRA, will almost certainly require every Senate Democrat agreeing to end the filibuster in some fashion—and at least two of them, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, have been adamantly opposed to that action. Merkley’s strategy for convincing Democrats to reconsider—at least for the democracy-reform legislation—is to encourage an extended debate on the bill, both within the committee and on the Senate floor, and to allow any senator to offer amendments. If Republicans still block final passage with a filibuster after that process, Democrats could either vote to “carve out” election-reform legislation from the filibuster, or require Republicans blocking the bill to actually filibuster in person, he told me. Democrats could change the rules to tell Republicans “you better be here day and night, because we are going to go for weeks and if you are not here, we are going to a final vote on the bill.”

Whatever mechanism Democrats employ, it’s clear the voter-mobilization groups that worked to produce their unified control are prepared to erupt if the party allows procedural constraints to block passage of H.R. 1 and the VRA. The New Georgia Project’s Ufot told me that when Biden and Harris campaigned in Georgia just before the twin runoff elections, they promised big change if the state’s voters gave them the Senate majority. They didn’t add an asterisk that change would be possible only if McConnell somehow chooses not to filibuster their agenda. “The filibuster never made it into any of [Senate Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer’s campaign ads; the filibuster was not a part of President Biden’s stump speeches, or Vice President Harris’s when she was down in Savannah,” Ufot said. “Their campaign rhetoric was on full blast, on 10, about why we needed to send them to Washington, D.C., to work on a progressive agenda.”

Saying “we can’t make progress on that agenda, because of existing rules that they have the ability to change will ring like a hollow argument, and it won’t bode well for this coalition,” Ufot added.

The last four times a president went into a midterm election with unified control of Congress, voters revoked it. That past isn’t necessarily prologue, but it does suggest that if Democrats don’t establish a national floor for voting access in the next two years, they might not have another opportunity to do so anytime soon.

Even if Democrats pass these laws, the Roberts-led Court could strike down portions of either H.R. 1 or a new VRA (though legal analysts I’ve spoken with doubt they would invalidate either measure entirely). A few years down the road, that might trigger another crisis over the Supreme Court’s partisan tilt. What’s clear now is that allowing a filibuster to kill these sweeping bills would precipitate a crisis in the Democratic coalition today—and also guarantee years of grinding state-by-state warfare over the right to vote and aggressive gerrymanders. If Democrats unilaterally surrender their current leverage, the consequences not only for the partisan competition, but for the underlying health of American democracy itself, could reverberate for decades.

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/01/democrats-biggest-decision-nuking-filibuster/617854/

[AuburnNTexas 7,167]

In the last 20 years a lot of the Rules in the Senate have changed. It used to be a collegial atmosphere where compromise was encouraged. Then little things the other party is being stubborn we can't get Presidents judges approved quickly enough lets go to a simple majority. It worked when that party was in power but then the next party took over and started ramming judges down the throat of the party that had changed the rules.  What happens if the filibuster is removed but the economy and pandemic take a turn for the worse. The other party blames the part in power and takes over both the House and the Senate then they will regret getting rid of the filibuster.

One of the reasons Biden won was he blamed Trump for mis-handling the Pandemic and he promised he would make huge changes that would fix all the issues. Then shortly after he took over he said we can't control it. In comparing states it seems that States like Ca. that shut down almost everything has not done any better in controlling pandemic than States like Fla. that did not go to the same extremes. Infection rates about same per 100,000 people with high fatality rates in Ca. which is surprising considering the large elderly population in Fla. Right now Biden's hope on curbing the Pandemic relies on the Vaccine's that were created in record time on Trumps watch. The economy is also reliant on the Vaccine getting to enough people to allow us to get back to a more normal pre-pandemic life style. What happens in the recent issues with the stocks and short selling cause the stock market to crash (The problem has been there for years) if it crashes and everyone's 401K goes in dumpster Biden and Democrats will be blamed. It won't be fair but is is what will happen. I would then expect a Republican landslide in 2 years.  

My point is changing the filibuster rule even for something you consider a good cause has long term consequences that might come back and bite you in the backend.

To me it is like when Obama did the executive order for DACA I agreed with what he was trying to do and I said it at the time. The problem is he was legislating by executive fiat. Legislation is supposed to be done by the House and Senate not by the President.  It opened the door to Trump to abuse executive orders and now I am seeing the same thing from Biden.  Hopefully there will be a Supreme Court case against one of Obama's, Trump's, or Biden's executive order that limits what a President can do by executive order. If there isn't we will have a King but call him President.

 

[homersapien 11,416]

All due respect, but I don't see the relevance of all that to the topic.

[AuburnNTexas 7,167]

4 hours ago, homersapien said:

All due respect, but I don't see the relevance of all that to the topic.

The relevance is changing the rukles and getting rid of the filibuster. Once done whichever Party is in Power will have complete control. The reason for the filibuster was and is to prevent that. My point is something changes and the other party takes control there will be nothing the Democrats can do to stop it.

[homersapien 11,416]

5 minutes ago, AuburnNTexas said:

The relevance is changing the rukles and getting rid of the filibuster. Once done whichever Party is in Power will have complete control. The reason for the filibuster was and is to prevent that. My point is something changes and the other party takes control there will be nothing the Democrats can do to stop it.

So be it.

 

[DKW 86 7,437]

Harry Reid and the Nuclear Options

Schumer regrets Dems triggering 'nuclear option'

How Democrats Paved the Way for the Confirmation of Trump's Cabinet

5 Years After Going Nuclear, Democrats Have Reaped What They Sowed

 

[SLAG-91 1,483]

We (our leaders for the last 2-3 generations at a minimum) seem to have lost sight of some of the reasons for having more-than-simple majorities for approving justices and other items that significantly impact governance...namely, it is INTENDED to be somewhat difficult to make big changes (3/4 of states needed to ratify an amendment, for example...2/3 of states needed to propose a new amendment...used to be 2/3 to invoke cloture in the Senate, then 3/5, now just a simple majority), and that there needed to be some degree of bipartisanship necessary to get big things done.

That's a good thing, in my view, but it is disappearing rapidly.

On another note, E.O. usage should be sparing, and they are used much too often by presidents instead of getting legislation by Congress passed, and presidents on team blue and team red were and are guilty of overuse of executive orders.

Tangent 2: Congresscritters need to write better legislation and quit throwing unrelated bullfeces into bills that would otherwise be good. If your bill is for Covid relief for businesses, don't put extraneous crap in it to make people look like a**holes for objecting to it..."Representative X hates children because he won't vote for this bill!" Representative X: "Take out this rider about studying the mating habits of rhesus monkeys and we'll talk."

Not a fan of doing something you maybe shouldn't just because you can, but I am no politician, either...that is their currency of choice. Quick hit, and then hopefully the withdrawal won't hurt too much.

[DKW 86 7,437]

Rahm Emanuel is famous for saying: "Never let a crisis go to waste." 

He advocates for implementing bad policy that could not get passed if the nation were fully engaged. Just remember the quote.

[bigbird 60,578]

Why take away safeguards that protect the minority? That seems foolish and extremely concerning. Especially when those in  power change so often.  

 

Compromise is a great thing. Why do away with standards that tend to encourage it?  This feels like an overreach by a majority party 

[aubiefifty 16,858]

i remember biden saying he refused to discuss it for now. i believe someone on msnbc said it. the impression i got was oe was not big on doing away with it.

[homersapien 11,416]

1 hour ago, bigbird said:

Why take away safeguards that protect the minority? That seems foolish and extremely concerning. Especially when those in  power change so often.  

 

Compromise is a great thing. Why do away with standards that tend to encourage it?  This feels like an overreach by a majority party 

As the last few decades have shown, the minority doesn't need protection.  They have come to dominate our political process because of the structure of our electoral system and the rules.  The fact that each state has two senators regardless of population is all the safeguard required to protect the minority.  That advantage, plus the filibuster - a device originally used to protect slavery - has resulted in a total gridlock of progress dictated by a minority of the electorate. That's inherently undemocratic.

And there is no compromise.  Compromise is a thing of the past.  We have evolved beyond the concept of shared power as the current Republican Party demonstrates. 

If the Republican Party wants to compete with the majority party they should broaden their appeal.  Instead they are trying to restrict the vote and rely on outdated procedural issues to maintain power as a minority of the electorate.

[I_M4_AU 7,916]

2 hours ago, bigbird said:

Why take away safeguards that protect the minority? That seems foolish and extremely concerning. Especially when those in  power change so often.  

 

Compromise is a great thing. Why do away with standards that tend to encourage it?  This feels like an overreach by a majority party 

When you turn off the safeguards you are an arrogant a$$.

 

[Leftfield 2,628]

1 hour ago, homersapien said:

As the last few decades have shown, the minority doesn't need protection.  They have come to dominate our political process because of the structure of our electoral system and the rules.  The fact that each state has two senators regardless of population is all the safeguard required to protect the minority.  That advantage, plus the filibuster - a device originally used to protect slavery - has resulted in a total gridlock of progress dictated by a minority of the electorate. That's inherently undemocratic.

And there is no compromise.  Compromise is a thing of the past.  We have evolved beyond the concept of shared power as the current Republican Party demonstrates. 

If the Republican Party wants to compete with the majority party they should broaden their appeal.  Instead they are trying to restrict the vote and rely on outdated procedural issues to maintain power as a minority of the electorate.

Admittedly I am not an expert on the history of Senate rules, but I don't ever recall hearing that the filibuster was originally used to protect slavery. I thought it was always a tool the Senate could use. Cloture wasn't even introduced until the 20th Century. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Regardless, as terrified as I am of the current Republican Party, I'm not ready to call for elimination of the filibuster. I do think the minority needs some protections, and a 60% majority is not an unreasonable threshold in my opinion. I choose to believe that the current downward spiral can be reversed and at some point our government brought back from the brink of total dysfunction. It's hard work, but we have to be willing to try to show people why a certain way is better, rather than this be forced through. I feel it will only close more minds off and convince the people that believe Democrats want power at all costs that they're right.

In addition, I believe any hope we have for a third party to emerge (admittedly, that hope was already slim and is getting worse in the current polarization) will be totally destroyed without a filibuster. With less pressure to compromise It will further force the public into two camps in a desperate attempt to hang on by the fingernails. We need more space for alternative voices to grow. Without it, the Trump fire steals all the oxygen.

If the Democrats try to beat Trump at his own game, it's not going to work - the old adage about wrestling a pig. They have to be better and show a different way. If they sink to the same level, then what remains on the other side of all this? The extremes of whatever Party has power will be in control, with the centrist voices squeezed out.

 

[bigbird 60,578]

31 minutes ago, Leftfield said:

Admittedly I am not an expert on the history of Senate rules, but I don't ever recall hearing that the filibuster was originally used to protect slavery. I thought it was always a tool the Senate could use. Cloture wasn't even introduced until the 20th Century. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Regardless, as terrified as I am of the current Republican Party, I'm not ready to call for elimination of the filibuster. I do think the minority needs some protections, and a 60% majority is not an unreasonable threshold in my opinion. I choose to believe that the current downward spiral can be reversed and at some point our government brought back from the brink of total dysfunction. It's hard work, but we have to be willing to try to show people why a certain way is better, rather than this be forced through. I feel it will only close more minds off and convince the people that believe Democrats want power at all costs that they're right.

In addition, I believe any hope we have for a third party to emerge (admittedly, that hope was already slim and is getting worse in the current polarization) will be totally destroyed without a filibuster. With less pressure to compromise It will further force the public into two camps in a desperate attempt to hang on by the fingernails. We need more space for alternative voices to grow. Without it, the Trump fire steals all the oxygen.

If the Democrats try to beat Trump at his own game, it's not going to work - the old adage about wrestling a pig. They have to be better and show a different way. If they sink to the same level, then what remains on the other side of all this? The extremes of whatever Party has power will be in control, with the centrist voices squeezed out.

 

[bigbird 60,578]

2 hours ago, homersapien said:

And there is no compromise.  Compromise is a thing of the past.  We have evolved beyond the concept of shared power as the current Republican Party demonstrates. 

That's just dumb

[homersapien 11,416]

23 hours ago, Leftfield said:

Admittedly I am not an expert on the history of Senate rules, but I don't ever recall hearing that the filibuster was originally used to protect slavery. I thought it was always a tool the Senate could use. Cloture wasn't even introduced until the 20th Century. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Regardless, as terrified as I am of the current Republican Party, I'm not ready to call for elimination of the filibuster. I do think the minority needs some protections, and a 60% majority is not an unreasonable threshold in my opinion. I choose to believe that the current downward spiral can be reversed and at some point our government brought back from the brink of total dysfunction. It's hard work, but we have to be willing to try to show people why a certain way is better, rather than this be forced through. I feel it will only close more minds off and convince the people that believe Democrats want power at all costs that they're right.

In addition, I believe any hope we have for a third party to emerge (admittedly, that hope was already slim and is getting worse in the current polarization) will be totally destroyed without a filibuster. With less pressure to compromise It will further force the public into two camps in a desperate attempt to hang on by the fingernails. We need more space for alternative voices to grow. Without it, the Trump fire steals all the oxygen.

If the Democrats try to beat Trump at his own game, it's not going to work - the old adage about wrestling a pig. They have to be better and show a different way. If they sink to the same level, then what remains on the other side of all this? The extremes of whatever Party has power will be in control, with the centrist voices squeezed out.

 

It's origin was based on slavery, but it is far better known for opposing civil rights legislation for blacks:

..........In 1846 Southern senators filibustered against a bill to appropriate money to purchase land from Mexico because it contained an amendment that prohibited slavery in the purchased territory. After a month-long filibuster, the appropriation passed—but without the antislavery provision......

........The cloture rule provided a method for cutting off filibusters by a small group, but it was powerless against filibusters supported by more than a third of senators, which explains how Southern Democrats were able to use filibusters to kill every meaningful civil rights bill for the next 47 years.

The Southern filibusters were serious, well-organized power plays designed to defeat any attempt to extend equal rights to black people. For decades, the House passed bills to outlaw discrimination and protect the right of black citizens to vote, only to watch the bills killed by filibusters in the Senate. In an era when white mobs frequently lynched black people with impunity, Southern senators used filibusters to defeat anti-lynching bills in 1922, 1935, 1938, 1948 and 1949.

While filibustering to deny rights to minority groups, Southern senators had the gall to tout the filibuster as a tool to protect minority rights—meaning the right of a minority of senators to prevent the majority from voting on civil rights bills.

“Without the filibuster,” said Sen. Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, “the minority would be at the mercy of the majority.”

“The filibuster is the last defense of reason, the sole defense of minorities,” said Sen. Lyndon Johnson of Texas, while filibustering against a 1949 civil rights bill.

Sen. Millard Tydings of Maryland took the argument even further: “It was cloture,” he said, “that crucified Christ on the cross.”

Not surprisingly, the longest solo filibuster in history was an anti–civil rights monologue. It came in 1957, when Lyndon Johnson was the Senate majority leader. Johnson wanted to become president but he calculated that he could never win the Democratic nomination if he was associated with the Senate’s infamous filibusters. So he carefully crafted a civil rights bill so toothless that his Southern colleagues agreed not to filibuster against it. But one senator broke that agreement—Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who was worried about reelection.

On August 28, 1957, Thurmond took a steam bath to dehydrate his body so it could absorb liquids without requiring a bathroom break. Armed with malt tablets and bits of cooked hamburger and diced pumpernickel, he began talking at 8:54 p.m., and he didn’t stop for the next 24 hours and 18 minutes. He read the voting laws of all 48 states and quoted George Washington’s Farewell Address, but he forgot to mention that 35 years earlier he had impregnated his parents’ 16-year-old black maid, and consequently one of the people he was fighting to keep segregated was his daughter.

Thurmond’s marathon broke the filibuster record set by Sen. Wayne Morse in 1953, when the Oregon maverick denounced an oil bill for 22 hours and 26 minutes. “I salute him,” Morse said of Thurmond. “It takes a lot out of a man to talk so long.”

But Thurmond’s Southern colleagues didn’t salute. They were livid when Strom’s publicity stunt sparked a barrage of phone calls and telegrams from angry segregationists back home, who demanded to know why they weren’t helping Thurmond fight for white supremacy......

https://www.historynet.com/a-short-history-of-the-filibuster.htm

 

See also The Filibuster and the Quest for New Slave States

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/ushistory1os/chapter/the-filibuster-and-the-quest-for-new-slave-states/

 

[homersapien 11,416]

1 hour ago, Leftfield said:

If the Democrats try to beat Trump at his own game, it's not going to work - the old adage about wrestling a pig. They have to be better and show a different way. If they sink to the same level, then what remains on the other side of all this? The extremes of whatever Party has power will be in control, with the centrist voices squeezed out.

 

The point is that the party that is in "control" should be the party that received the majority of votes.  What we have been experiencing for 7 out of the last 8 years is control by a party that has less than a majority of votes because of archaic rules.  It's anti-democratic.

If the party in control loses that majority support in the next election, then they lose control.

[homersapien 11,416]

More history:

"The history, you know, it’s important to understand that the framers, for all their own racism and slaveholding status, even they did not want the filibuster to exist. When they created the Senate, it was an institution that had no filibuster power. It was designed to be a majority-rule body. It was designed to discourage obstruction. They were very clear about this; this wasn’t just sort of a coincidence or sort of a gray area. The reason they were clear about it was that they created the Constitution in the shadows of the Articles of Confederation, and the widespread view at the time was that the reason the Articles of Confederation failed was that its Congress required a supermajority threshold to pass most major legislation. And so, the framers saw that that had been a disaster, and they created a Senate that was majority rule.

And they wrote very clearly in The Federalist Papers, in their own correspondence and other sources that they believed that a minority, a numerical minority, in the Senate should not be given the power to obstruct what the majority wanted to do. By all means, the Senate was supposed to be deliberative. It was supposed to be thoughtful. It was supposed to take things a little slower than the House. But there was a certain point at which debate was considered to have run its course. And at that point, a majority was allowed to end debate, bring the bill up for a vote and pass or fail it on a majority vote.

What happened was, over the course of several decades, after all the framers had passed away, other senators did use some obstructive tactics over the early decades, but it was very rare. John C. Calhoun came along, the “Great Nullifier,” senator from South Carolina, sort of a grandfather of the Confederacy, and he innovated some of the tactics that became known as the modern filibuster. And he did it for the express purpose of increasing the power of the slaveholding class. What he saw at this time — this was around the 1830s and 1840s — was that slaveholders and slave states were becoming steadily outpowered in Congress. And so, he knew that if majority rule was allowed to continue, slavery was going to end. And they needed to — he felt a very compelling desire, from his perspective, to increase their power in the Senate.

And so, what he did was innovate what we would describe as the modern talking filibuster, the sort of Jimmy Stewart-style holding the floor, joining with allies, to delay a bill that he opposed, and, at the same time, doing it all in the service of this lofty principle of minority rights. And what he — the minority that he sought to protect was not a vulnerable population, by any means. It was the planter class, the slaveholders. And so, that was the origin of this essential principle of minority rights being tied to the filibuster. It was a desire to protect not a vulnerable minority, but the minority of the planter class against the march of progress, that Calhoun thought would progress under a majority-rule system......"

https://www.democracynow.org/2021/1/25/kill_switch_adam_jentleson_senate_filibuster

[homersapien 11,416]

2 hours ago, bigbird said:

That's just dumb

I didn't say that's the way I preferred it.   But it is what it is.  McConnell is who he is. 

Republicans - who don't even have the support of the majority of voters - play hard ball.  If they can manipulate the rules to control legislation on the behalf of a minority of voters, then it's past time for Democrats to manipulate the rules to serve the majority of voters.

And compromise doesn't require the existence of a filibuster. It can be based on ones up or down vote. 

......."Those who want to keep the filibuster often reminisce about a halcyon era of compromise, gentility and bipartisan cooperation in the Senate. To be fair, it is true that bipartisanship has declined in recent years. But even half a century ago, segregationist senators put up a fight against the Civil Rights Act of 1957 using the filibuster, delaying for weeks legislation that would give basic rights to Black Americans. And even if we ignore the filibuster’s dark past, the political polarization of the present still makes a strong case for its elimination. No modern party is likely to reach a 60-vote majority on its own, and banking on senators crossing the aisle to support hot-button issues is a fool’s errand.

The power that the minority of senators can wield over the legislative process is even more garish when you consider that the Senate is under-representative of the American population. The 21 least-populous states – which between them elect 41 senators, enough to sink any bill because of the filibuster – represent only 11 percent of the U.S. population. Any legislative procedure that would allow such a slim minority of the electorate to block the will of the vast majority has no place in a modern democracy.".....

https://www.gwhatchet.com/2020/08/23/the-filibuster-is-a-threat-to-democracy-and-should-be-eliminated/

 

 

[Leftfield 2,628]

You make some very good points. I will have to research this a bit more. It still makes me very nervous, as I do think it should be difficult to make major changes with government and the lack of a filibuster would stifle some legitimate debate, but I agree it has clearly been abused at times, as it was with Thurmond.

Thanks for the information. I'll dig deeper.

[jj3jordan 2,058]

Did you leave out the party of these "Southern Senators"?  Democrats.

[DKW 86 7,437]

On 1/30/2021 at 10:07 AM, homersapien said:

And there is no compromise.  Compromise is a thing of the past.  We have evolved beyond the concept of shared power as the current Republican Party demonstrates. 

 

On 1/30/2021 at 11:12 AM, I_M4_AU said:

When you turn off the safeguards you are an arrogant a$$.

 

23 hours ago, bigbird said:

That's just dumb

You cannot argue sanity with a Zealot. It is a complete waste of time... When you can show someone that they are CLEARLY about to make a mistake, and they reject all warnings in the name of emotional immaturity, you are wasting your time.

There are two cures for Zealotry:
Great Loss that afterwards wakes them up to the errors they made or
Death. 

We have just shown that many already clearly recognize the error from a short time ago. 
Making the same choice (error) as you did before and hoping for another outcome is called?

[bigbird 60,578]

8 hours ago, DKW 86 said:

Making the same choice (error) as you did before and hoping for another outcome is called?

Progressive? 😁

 

 

[autigeremt 6,660]

On 1/29/2021 at 9:05 PM, homersapien said:

So be it.

 

THIS ^^^^^ is why I no longer belong to a party! It's not about America. It's about the party. 

[DKW 86 7,437]

1 hour ago, autigeremt said:

THIS ^^^^^ is why I no longer belong to a party! It's not about America. It's about the party. 

now you see it, it cant be unseen.