Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images A few weeks ago, Republicans launched a vigorous defense of the filibuster against the charge that it is a Jim Crow relic. Sure, they conceded, it was used to block some civil-rights bills here and there, but lots of tactics were used to block civil-rights bills. Are they all racist too? Huh?
This was the period when the filibuster took shape. Jim Crow was the essential backdrop to its formation. The Senate never would have tolerated a two-thirds requirement for all legislation for so long. The filibuster was only able to survive this long because of a broad understanding that the white South had a special interest in blocking civil-rights laws, and the filibuster would be reserved principally for this purpose.
began with Mansfield meeting with Georgia Democrat Richard Russell, the leader of the senators opposed to the Civil Rights Act. Mansfield promised there would be no tricks and he would keep Russell fully informed of Mansfield’s actions as he guided the bill through floor debate. … If you had suggested at any time during these decades either to civil-rights advocates or to segregationists that the filibuster was somehow helpful to the civil-rights cause, they’d have laughed you out of the room. Hoppe’s argument is ludicrously ahistorical.
that had something to do with the way the act passed—not by a simple majority forcing its will on the minority but by allowing the two sides to argue their case at length, by allowing the legislative process of debate and amendment to proceed unhindered, by gathering the votes needed to show the country that it must change the law, by carrying the country along through the months of discussion and compromise, by fulfilling the highest expectations of the Founders, Mansfield, Dirksen and other...
jonathanchait Fascists deal in lies. This is not new.
jonathanchait Na$i says what?!
jonathanchait The Senate was intended to be a deliberative body.