Another morning waking up to the news of another mass shooting – that there had been a mass shooting at Boulder, Colorado grocery store where 10 people had perished including a 51 year old police officer. That police officer left behind a wife and seven offspring. This follows the very recent event (Tuesday, March 16) of an assailant murdering eight people, including six Asian women at different massage parlor locations in the Atlanta Metropolitan Region. According to CNN, there has been seven mass shootings in the last seven days in the United States. I have long since resigned to the fact that this country, a place I have lived for 50 years of my life, had no desire to deal with the massive gun violence after Sandy Hook in December of 2012. If the news of elementary school children being gunned down couldn’t convince us as a society to make massive changes to our gun laws, if politicians were going to continue to be swayed by the gun lobby, then nothing, nothing at all would relive us of our insatiable appetite for weapons of war.
But gun control is just one issue that America can’t seem to progress on. A Pew Research survey conducted in October 2019 – months before the pandemic – indicated that 60% of Americans are in favor of stricter gun laws. Other issues like dealing with climate change, universal healthcare, infrastructure/access to broadband, a higher federal minimum wage and a myriad of other issues always appear to be stymied in Congress – despite the majority of Americans being in favor of these initiatives.
America is becoming more progressive, a more ethnically diverse nation. Nearly 83% of us live in metropolitan areas – in urban and suburban districts. You would think that public policy and our politics would reflect where, who and how the majority of us live. But why are debates, media talking points and our conversations still primarily centered around how the 17% of us (mostly white, rural populous) feel about things like gun control. Why must legislation that is passed, barely make it through a razor thin majority in the United States Senate? Or just a short couple of months ago under then Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s leadership, bills from the House of Representatives never saw the light of day on the Senate floor?
You may have heard this commonly used phrase or term to describe legislation that requires a super majority to pass the United States Senate – the filibuster. An arcane rule that requires 60 Senators to vote ‘yes’ on a piece of legislation. It effectively allows the minority party to have outsized influence on our political process.
Now you’re probably asking right now why did I mention racism in the title of this blog? And what the hell does this have to do with things like the filibuster? Well for starters lets look at the history of the filibuster, why it is inherently racist and why the GOP and some moderate/conservative Democrats want to preserve and maintain it. How it prevents us from serving the aspirations of the majority of us.
The definition of the filibuster is essentially this: the Senate cloture rule—which requires 60 members to end debate on most topics and move to a vote. Its origins are, believed by many historians, from Vice President Aaron Burr after his indictment for the murder Alexander Hamilton. In rewriting the Senate rule book, Burr removed the “previous question motion” language, which would have allowed a majority of lawmakers to end debate and force a vote on a bill. In 1806, the Senate adopted the changes some historians believe by mistake. In practice before the Civil War and throughout much of the 19th Century the filibuster was rarely used.
From the June 27, 2020 article in The Atlantic (“The Senate Filibuster Is Another Monument to White Supremacy”) – many senators favored eliminating the filibuster altogether, but in the end they compromised and created a new Senate rule: If two-thirds of the upper chamber came together, a speaker could be cut off and a filibuster broken. This was the first appearance of the filibuster in its modern form, though the required number of votes was later reduced to three-fifths. A grumpy trio or quartet could no longer slam the brakes on the entire legislative process, but a faction of senators—a group larger than a handful but smaller than a majority—could still kill any bill it pleased.
A group that was large enough to kill bills it wasn’t in favor of were segregationist Democrats from the South. And they largely opposed any Civil Rights legislation. In the 1920s, Massachusetts Republican Henry Cabot Lodge introduced an anti-lynching bill. The bill was passed by the majority of the House and enjoyed majority support in the Senate. But the minority faction of the segregationists wing of the Senate was large enough to obstruct a vote on the proposed legislation – through tactics like the reading of the Senate journal during which amendments could arbitrarily be added to weigh down and ultimately kill the bill.
The filibuster’s origins were not inherently racist, rather it being deployed as an instrument to prevent progress on Civil Rights were. Nearly 200 pieces of legislation to put a halt to the systemic practice of lynching mostly African Americans have been proposed over the latter part of the 20th Century but those bills never received a vote in the United States Senate due to the filibuster. Since the Jim Crow era, there has been a host of progressive legislation that has never made it to the Senate floor. The tactic has become standard practice for the minority party in the upper chamber of Congress to obstruct majority rule – and therefore prevent the types of things the majority of Americans want.
Recently we have witness the COVID-19 Relief Package pass through the Senate and signed into law by President Joe Biden through a process called reconciliation – a budgetary procedure that allows a piece of legislation to avoid the filibuster. That is how it was able to pass with a simple majority – with Vice President Kamala Harris providing the 51st tie-breaking vote, with no GOP support. However, items such as gun control don’t involve budgets or deficit spending, so the arcane rules of the Senate won’t allow for that item, plus many others to leverage reconciliation to avoid the filibuster.
The filibuster for nearly a century has been used by segregationist Southern Democrats, now largely the Republican Party as a tool to enforce minority rule. It also harms the confidence the public has in Congress and government for that matter. How often have you thought of Congress as a do-nothing legislative body… a place where nothing ever gets done? People become disenchanted and disengaged from the political process, oftentimes even affecting voter participation. Because of its historical use as a bulwark against Civil Rights, it is inherently racist. But the filibuster prevents all of us as a society from progressing further regardless of race.
All people would benefit from true universal healthcare. All people would benefit from semi-automatic weapons either being heavily regulated or removed from our streets so we can conduct our affairs like grocery shopping in relative peace. All people could benefit from improved roads, high speed trains from major city to major city, broadband access to close the digital divide. Our climate and future generations could benefit from an energy system that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels. Many people, especially the working poor immersed in poverty could benefit from the increase in the minimum wage. The filibuster along with other forms of institutionalized racism prevents the whole of society, regardless of our backgrounds from receiving what the MAJORITY of us in America clearly wants and desires.
Chronicles in the Black 
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