Post by the Scribe on Mar 2, 2021 8:25:45 GMT
The Senate filibuster has a racist past and present. End it so America can move forward.
news.yahoo.com/senate-filibuster-racist-past-present-081503382.html
Rashad Robinson, Opinion contributor
Mon, March 1, 2021, 1:15 AM·6 min read
Once again, we have a Democratic president trying to urgently solve a crisis in America. Once again, Americans are demanding action on racial injustice because they have come to see it as a barrier for everyone’s progress. And once again, even though Democrats control the Senate agenda with a bare majority, Republicans have more than enough senators to block bills with a filibuster.
The nature of the filibuster, its rules and norms, is hardly an iron-clad tradition. It has changed and adapted greatly over the years since it first became popular in the civil rights era. But what hasn’t changed is its enduring connection to racism. The filibuster has always stood in the way of racial progress, whether employed by Southern Democrats of the Jim Crow era or the Republican Party today after a major shift in the party's stance on racial equality. When you understand the filibuster’s racist past, it becomes clear that it has a racist present as well — and that we need to get rid of it.
www.history.com/news/how-the-party-of-lincoln-won-over-the-once-democratic-south
Don’t take my word for it, take theirs. In 1922 the House passed a vital anti-lynching bill to combat the worst violence of the Ku Klux Klan, but it was filibustered in the Senate by southern Senate Democrats. Congress tried again in 1935, but Georgia Democrat Richard Russell organized a six-day filibuster to oppose it. He had once said he was “willing to go as far and make as great a sacrifice to preserve and insure white supremacy in the social, economic, and political life of our state as any man who lives within her borders.” Now the Senate’s grandest office building is named for him. Congress has never — to this day — passed an anti-lynching bill.
www.naacp.org/naacp-history-dyer-anti-lynching-bill/
scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/stakeman/dyer-anti-lynching-bill
www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/takeaway/segments/racist-filibuster-we-cant-afford-forget
A tool of repression from the start
South Carolina segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond set a record for the longest one man filibuster in history in a bid to stop the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which protected voting rights for Black Americans. In a 24-hour-long screed on the Senate floor, Thurmond, a central figure among racist Southern "Dixiecrats" who left the Democratic Party soon thereafter, compared the legislation to cruel and unusual punishment.
www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/03/07/173736882/how-did-strom-thurmond-last-through-his-24-hour-filibuster
www.senate.gov/senators/FeaturedBios/Featured_Bio_Thurmond.htm
www.msnbc.com/politicsnation/the-record-beat-rand-pauls-13-hour-fili-msna19575
Thurmond’s strategy backfired, as enough Americans found such blatant racism repugnant, and the Senate later changed the filibuster rules. Since the 1970s, most filibusters have been "silent" — that is, all you need to do is threaten to stop a bill. Individual senators no longer have to actually stand up and voice their objections. They can block legislation, which too often includes measures to advance racial justice, secretly and silently, without ever having to go on record about why.
historynewsnetwork.org/article/149663
But with the way Republican senators have used the filibuster of late, the winners and losers haven’t changed. In recent years, they have filibustered major legislation like the DREAM Act, the Affordable Care Act, and several proposals for sensible gun reform that overwhelmingly benefit communities of color.
www.politico.com/story/2010/12/dream-act-dies-in-senate-046573
www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/25/ted-cruz-marathon-speech-obamacare
www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/meet-the-senator-who-filibustered-for-15-hours-on-gun-control-171203/
Sen. Strom Thurmond after his filibuster on Aug. 29, 1957, in Washington, D.C.
It’s important to understand that, when used this way, the filibuster hurts all of us, not just the Black community or whichever community Republicans are targeting in the moment.
This is not just about the principle that our nation is stronger when all people are given an equal chance to thrive. This is about how the Republican Party has become so perverted in its never-ending quest to hold power in the face of demographic change, to stay loyal to its corporate paymasters, that it will sacrifice anything just to keep control.
www.axios.com/election-biden-trump-demographics-639b6c8e-6e5c-43c8-962f-dca6a127c4ef.html
To achieve that, the Republican Party decades ago launched a four-part strategy to hijack government to the will of the minority. The filibuster is the prime (but not only) example of the first part, which is changing and abusing the rules of representative government to give more and more power to fewer and fewer people.
The second part is a similar abuse of the rules of voting. Republicans' push to gerrymander legislative districts allows a minority of voters to choose a majority of seats. Their campaigns to enact voter ID laws, block the voting rights of ex-felons and conduct biased voter roll purges make it harder for Black people to vote.
www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/new-voter-suppression
www.cnn.com/2020/09/02/politics/georgia-voter-rolls-report/index.html
Third is their drive to give corporations more power by relaxing rules around political donations and allowing corporate groups to write draft legislation. That has led to more government policy to benefit corporations at the expense of everyday people, and prevents Black communities, in particular, from being able to fight back against corporate attacks and exploitation.
colorofchange.org/press_release/major-companies-leave-alec-colorofchange-organizin/
www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/new-congressional-study-finds-little-economic-benefit-2017-tax-cuts
www.epi.org/publication/deregulation-year-in-review/
Finally, most obviously, the Republicans have spent years remaking the court system into a radically conservative engine for blocking, slowing, and overturning progressive legislation.
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/07/how-conservatives-won-the-battle-over-the-courts/564533/
www.cnn.com/2021/01/19/politics/trump-supreme-court-legacy/index.html
The end result is that anyone in this country who needs something real — real change or help — loses out to the Republicans’ obsession with power.
Filibuster workaround on COVID relief
That’s never been more clear than right now, with a 50-50 Senate and a Democratic tiebreaker in Vice President Kamala Harris.
The country faces a once-in-a-generation health and economic disaster, yet Republicans have said they would use the filibuster to block President Joe Biden's pandemic relief bill. Senate Democrats plan to work around that with a special budget rule, but that only applies in rare cases.
www.politico.com/news/2021/01/21/biden-coronavirus-stimulus-plan-461216
www.cnn.com/2021/02/23/politics/who-is-elizabeth-macdonough-senate-parliamentarian/index.html
Everything else is vulnerable to the filibuster. For instance, voters ranked racial equality the second most important issue in the 2020 election, behind only the economy, after a year of spiking awareness of Black men and women lost to police violence. We have just endured an unprecedented level of attack on the integrity of our elections and post-election attempts to disenfranchise Black voters. Democrats have ambitious plans to address these problems with the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, but the filibuster threatens them in the Senate.
www.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/national-results
www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/7120
www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/how-to-restore-and-strengthen-voting-rights-act
Other proposals in support of economic equality, phone justice for incarcerated individuals and statehood for Washington, D.C. stalled last year in a Republican-controlled Senate and would likely fail again if the filibuster stays in force.
www.majorityleader.gov/content/major-legislation-house-democrats-have-passed-people-lowering-health-care-costs-higher
rush.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/rush-s-prison-phone-justice-act-passes-house
www.politico.com/news/2020/06/26/washington-dc-statehood-bill-passes-341591
All of these measures of social, economic, racial and civic justice would benefit all Americans, but because they would benefit Black Americans in particular, they are blocked by a Republican Party that cannot hold onto power without racially posturing to its shrinking base. The filibuster is the GOP's tool for doing so.
It’s time for the filibuster to go. It has no place in our modern political structure and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Democrats must finally get rid of it.
Rashad Robinson is president of Color Of Change. Follow him on Twitter: @rashadrobinson
colorofchange.org/
You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Racist past, racist present: End the filibuster to make progress for all
www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/03/01/end-filibuster-make-progress-race-voting-guns-health-care-column/6779720002/
news.yahoo.com/senate-filibuster-racist-past-present-081503382.html
Rashad Robinson, Opinion contributor
Mon, March 1, 2021, 1:15 AM·6 min read
Once again, we have a Democratic president trying to urgently solve a crisis in America. Once again, Americans are demanding action on racial injustice because they have come to see it as a barrier for everyone’s progress. And once again, even though Democrats control the Senate agenda with a bare majority, Republicans have more than enough senators to block bills with a filibuster.
The nature of the filibuster, its rules and norms, is hardly an iron-clad tradition. It has changed and adapted greatly over the years since it first became popular in the civil rights era. But what hasn’t changed is its enduring connection to racism. The filibuster has always stood in the way of racial progress, whether employed by Southern Democrats of the Jim Crow era or the Republican Party today after a major shift in the party's stance on racial equality. When you understand the filibuster’s racist past, it becomes clear that it has a racist present as well — and that we need to get rid of it.
www.history.com/news/how-the-party-of-lincoln-won-over-the-once-democratic-south
Don’t take my word for it, take theirs. In 1922 the House passed a vital anti-lynching bill to combat the worst violence of the Ku Klux Klan, but it was filibustered in the Senate by southern Senate Democrats. Congress tried again in 1935, but Georgia Democrat Richard Russell organized a six-day filibuster to oppose it. He had once said he was “willing to go as far and make as great a sacrifice to preserve and insure white supremacy in the social, economic, and political life of our state as any man who lives within her borders.” Now the Senate’s grandest office building is named for him. Congress has never — to this day — passed an anti-lynching bill.
www.naacp.org/naacp-history-dyer-anti-lynching-bill/
scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/stakeman/dyer-anti-lynching-bill
www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/takeaway/segments/racist-filibuster-we-cant-afford-forget
A tool of repression from the start
South Carolina segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond set a record for the longest one man filibuster in history in a bid to stop the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which protected voting rights for Black Americans. In a 24-hour-long screed on the Senate floor, Thurmond, a central figure among racist Southern "Dixiecrats" who left the Democratic Party soon thereafter, compared the legislation to cruel and unusual punishment.
www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/03/07/173736882/how-did-strom-thurmond-last-through-his-24-hour-filibuster
www.senate.gov/senators/FeaturedBios/Featured_Bio_Thurmond.htm
www.msnbc.com/politicsnation/the-record-beat-rand-pauls-13-hour-fili-msna19575
Thurmond’s strategy backfired, as enough Americans found such blatant racism repugnant, and the Senate later changed the filibuster rules. Since the 1970s, most filibusters have been "silent" — that is, all you need to do is threaten to stop a bill. Individual senators no longer have to actually stand up and voice their objections. They can block legislation, which too often includes measures to advance racial justice, secretly and silently, without ever having to go on record about why.
historynewsnetwork.org/article/149663
But with the way Republican senators have used the filibuster of late, the winners and losers haven’t changed. In recent years, they have filibustered major legislation like the DREAM Act, the Affordable Care Act, and several proposals for sensible gun reform that overwhelmingly benefit communities of color.
www.politico.com/story/2010/12/dream-act-dies-in-senate-046573
www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/25/ted-cruz-marathon-speech-obamacare
www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/meet-the-senator-who-filibustered-for-15-hours-on-gun-control-171203/
Sen. Strom Thurmond after his filibuster on Aug. 29, 1957, in Washington, D.C.
It’s important to understand that, when used this way, the filibuster hurts all of us, not just the Black community or whichever community Republicans are targeting in the moment.
This is not just about the principle that our nation is stronger when all people are given an equal chance to thrive. This is about how the Republican Party has become so perverted in its never-ending quest to hold power in the face of demographic change, to stay loyal to its corporate paymasters, that it will sacrifice anything just to keep control.
www.axios.com/election-biden-trump-demographics-639b6c8e-6e5c-43c8-962f-dca6a127c4ef.html
To achieve that, the Republican Party decades ago launched a four-part strategy to hijack government to the will of the minority. The filibuster is the prime (but not only) example of the first part, which is changing and abusing the rules of representative government to give more and more power to fewer and fewer people.
Trump and extremism: Far-right extremists went mainstream under Trump. The Capitol attack cements his legacy.
www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/02/15/capitol-riots-have-lasting-impact-domestic-terrorism-column/6709778002/
www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/02/15/capitol-riots-have-lasting-impact-domestic-terrorism-column/6709778002/
The second part is a similar abuse of the rules of voting. Republicans' push to gerrymander legislative districts allows a minority of voters to choose a majority of seats. Their campaigns to enact voter ID laws, block the voting rights of ex-felons and conduct biased voter roll purges make it harder for Black people to vote.
www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/new-voter-suppression
www.cnn.com/2020/09/02/politics/georgia-voter-rolls-report/index.html
Third is their drive to give corporations more power by relaxing rules around political donations and allowing corporate groups to write draft legislation. That has led to more government policy to benefit corporations at the expense of everyday people, and prevents Black communities, in particular, from being able to fight back against corporate attacks and exploitation.
colorofchange.org/press_release/major-companies-leave-alec-colorofchange-organizin/
www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/new-congressional-study-finds-little-economic-benefit-2017-tax-cuts
www.epi.org/publication/deregulation-year-in-review/
Finally, most obviously, the Republicans have spent years remaking the court system into a radically conservative engine for blocking, slowing, and overturning progressive legislation.
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/07/how-conservatives-won-the-battle-over-the-courts/564533/
www.cnn.com/2021/01/19/politics/trump-supreme-court-legacy/index.html
The end result is that anyone in this country who needs something real — real change or help — loses out to the Republicans’ obsession with power.
Filibuster workaround on COVID relief
That’s never been more clear than right now, with a 50-50 Senate and a Democratic tiebreaker in Vice President Kamala Harris.
The country faces a once-in-a-generation health and economic disaster, yet Republicans have said they would use the filibuster to block President Joe Biden's pandemic relief bill. Senate Democrats plan to work around that with a special budget rule, but that only applies in rare cases.
www.politico.com/news/2021/01/21/biden-coronavirus-stimulus-plan-461216
www.cnn.com/2021/02/23/politics/who-is-elizabeth-macdonough-senate-parliamentarian/index.html
Everything else is vulnerable to the filibuster. For instance, voters ranked racial equality the second most important issue in the 2020 election, behind only the economy, after a year of spiking awareness of Black men and women lost to police violence. We have just endured an unprecedented level of attack on the integrity of our elections and post-election attempts to disenfranchise Black voters. Democrats have ambitious plans to address these problems with the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, but the filibuster threatens them in the Senate.
www.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/national-results
www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/7120
www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/how-to-restore-and-strengthen-voting-rights-act
Spare us: After Trump, seven Republican lectures Democrats never need to hear again
www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/02/17/after-trump-republicans-no-credibility-spare-us-lectures-column/4479730001/
www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/02/17/after-trump-republicans-no-credibility-spare-us-lectures-column/4479730001/
Other proposals in support of economic equality, phone justice for incarcerated individuals and statehood for Washington, D.C. stalled last year in a Republican-controlled Senate and would likely fail again if the filibuster stays in force.
www.majorityleader.gov/content/major-legislation-house-democrats-have-passed-people-lowering-health-care-costs-higher
rush.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/rush-s-prison-phone-justice-act-passes-house
www.politico.com/news/2020/06/26/washington-dc-statehood-bill-passes-341591
All of these measures of social, economic, racial and civic justice would benefit all Americans, but because they would benefit Black Americans in particular, they are blocked by a Republican Party that cannot hold onto power without racially posturing to its shrinking base. The filibuster is the GOP's tool for doing so.
It’s time for the filibuster to go. It has no place in our modern political structure and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Democrats must finally get rid of it.
Rashad Robinson is president of Color Of Change. Follow him on Twitter: @rashadrobinson
colorofchange.org/
You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Racist past, racist present: End the filibuster to make progress for all
www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/03/01/end-filibuster-make-progress-race-voting-guns-health-care-column/6779720002/