At his first official 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.”
His memory can’t be that short.
Fortunately, his office later walked that statement back, saying McConnell was referring only to the origins of the filibuster, not its later well-known 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
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on Thursday — the same day as Biden’s news conference, in which he called such laws “un-American.”________
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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.
Similar measures have been introduced in other states in the wake of former President Donald Trump’s lies about a stolen election last November, despite an absence of evidence of fraud sufficiently widespread to have changed election outcomes.
“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 democratic republic works best when lawmakers from both parties find ways to compromise and 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.
As Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, second highest-ranking Democrat in the Senate, declared recently, the filibuster is “making a mockery of American democracy.”
He 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, as Jimmy Stewart famously did in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”
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, a right we traditionally think is a benefit of getting elected.
As the Senate site recounts, there were only 58 motions for cloture between 1917 and 1970, eight of which ended debate. But in recent years, both parties have been using the filibuster at an increased rate, which is evident in a spike in cloture motions.
In 2019 and 2020, when the GOP was in the Senate’s majority, the motions for cloture jumped to 328 of which 270 resulted in cloture. Of those motions to end debate, all but one was filed by then-Majority Leader McConnell, mostly to get his judges appointed.
Do we really want this filibuster madness to continue?
Yes, there’s still a chance to avoid such a drastic move as dumping the filibuster. 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.
Clarence Page, a member of the Tribune Editorial Board, blogs at www.chicagotribune.com/pagespage.
Twitter @cptime