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Biden Won’t Touch It: Here’s How The Filibuster Has Been Weaponized Against Black America

Biden Won’t Touch It: Here’s How The Filibuster Has Been Weaponized Against Black America

filibuster
Biden Won’t Touch It: Here’s How The Filibuster Has Been Weaponized Against Black America Photo: President Joe Biden walks to board Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House,Feb. 12, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

There are growing calls to end the filibuster, a political maneuver with racist roots that attempts to block or delay Senate action on House bills or other matters with never-ending debates, countless procedural motions and other obstructive methods.

President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus relief package brought the filibuster back into the spotlight as the administration tried to filibuster-proof the package.

A filibuster wasn’t needed. Biden’s package passed in the Senate, and White House officials confirmed over the weekend that Biden remains opposed to ending the filibuster, The Hill reported.

“It is still his position (that the filibuster should be preserved),” White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.” 

Civil rights activist Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, wrote in USA Today that 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 … 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,” Robinson wrote.

In 1922, the House passed an anti-lynching bill that was filibustered in the Senate by Southern Senate Democrats. In 1935, Congress again tried to pass an anti-lynching bill but a Georgia Democrat organized a six-day filibuster against it. South Carolina segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond staged the longest one-man filibuster ever to stop the 1957 Civil Rights Act protecting voting rights for Black Americans. In a 24-hour-long speech on the Senate floor, Thurmond, a “Dixiecrat,” said the legislation was cruel and unusual punishment, Robinson wrote. Thurmond’s filibuster failed, but others haven’t.

Economist Robert Bernard Reich, tweeted, “The filibuster was popularized in the Jim Crow era by Southerners who wanted to prevent the Northern majority from passing legislation in favor of civil rights for Black citizens. Abolish it.”

https://twitter.com/NV_CA_Insurance/status/1367476664771444737?s=20

Former President Barack Obama called for an end to the filibuster during his eulogy last summer for civil rights leader and longtime Congressman Rep. John Lewis, Politifact reported.

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“You want to honor John? Let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for,” Obama said, referring to Lewis’ work to strengthen the Voting Rights Act. “And if all this takes eliminating the filibuster – another Jim Crow relic – in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do.”