The Filibuster Holds Equal Rights Hostage

If you’ve been watching the news at all over the last few months, you’ve definitely heard the word “filibuster” a few times — some people arguing for it, some arguing against it, some people calling it racist, some saying it’s an essential Senate rule. But what is the filibuster, and what does it mean for our fight for justice and equality?

You might have seen the movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” This is the classic fantasy of the filibuster — a brave hero standing up, literally, for what is right by talking for hours on end, combating a corrupt establishment trying to crush the underrepresented and underserved. Portrayed that way, it seems like a pretty amazing thing. But that’s not what the filibuster really looks like, at least not today. And it’s certainly not the same tool that benefits the marginalized that’s so common in the American imagination.

A brief overview of how Senate votes work: after a bill is introduced and goes through committee markups and finally reaches the Senate floor, any and every senator can have their say. This is called “debate,” and it continues until the Senate votes for debate to end so that the entire Senate can vote on whether to pass the bill. Both the vote to end debate and the vote for passage require 51 “YES” votes, so throughout most of American history, it’s taken just this simple majority of support to pass legislation. Recently, however, the filibuster has been used more and more, obstructing the traditional majoritarian process.

So where does the filibuster come in? The filibuster is essentially, at least in theory, what happens when a senator takes the floor during debate and does not give it up. The only way to end a filibuster is to end debate with a 60-senator “cloture” vote. In practice, though, it looks pretty different. You don’t often see senators on the floor talking for hours and hours in order to prevent passage of a bill. Instead of that “talking filibuster,” we have the “silent filibuster,” which is what happens when a senator threatens to filibuster a bill, and just that threat can shut down any hopes to pass a bill. That means that if a bill doesn’t have the support of at least 60 senators, just one opposed senator can hold up and even kill a bill. Usage of the filibuster has risen dramatically in the last few decades, especially over the last ten years, peaking under the leadership of Senator Mitch McConnell, with 218 cloture votes in 2013 and 2014, and 168 in 2017 and 2018. In comparison, from 1970 to 2000, the Senate invoked cloture an average of 17 times a year.

Supporters of the filibuster say that the process protects the interests of the minority, that it helps the suppressed stand up and be heard. But that’s not really how the filibuster has been used over the course of American history. The filibuster, of both the talking and the silent kind, has often been weaponized to maintain the status quo, to the detriment of people of color.

A sort of proto-filibuster emerged in the antebellum period, innovated by Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. He used obstructionist tactics that would lay the foundation for how the filibuster can be used in order to represent the interests of slave-owning planters in the South, namely the preservation of slavery.

After the Civil War, the segregation and structural racism of the Jim Crow era also benefited from such tactics. It was during this time, specifically the early 20th century, that the filibuster transitioned into a more official form as the talking filibuster. It was used to block important early civil rights bills like anti-lynching bills. In fact, the United States still has no anti-lynching law, as it has been held up in the Senate time and time again, even in this past summer of 2020.

The filibuster was also used to prevent passage of bills that would have made racist poll taxes illegal. This was yet another way that the filibuster has been weaponized against people of color, particularly Black people. Perhaps most infamously, the filibuster was frequently used after World War II to oppose civil rights legislation like the Civil Rights Act, and it is still a common weapon against civil rights legislation — bills like the Equality Act or the ERA deadline extension. The filibuster is holding us back from having a truly equitable society. We’ve never been able to pass comprehensive civil rights legislation in the United States, and this has had a massive impact on so many Americans. LGBTQIA+ people, women, and people of color still face discrimination at work, at school, and in every part of their lives.

Today, we’re gearing up for two more big fights around voting rights and accessibility. It is absolutely essential that this government passes and implements both the For the People Act, which would strengthen mail voting and make voter registration easier, among many other crucial reforms, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would make voting more accessible to communities of color. Senators who want to suppress the votes of BIPOC and working-class people will inevitably use the filibuster to hold up such essential legislation.

With a 50–50 partisan split in the Senate and such obstinate opposition to progress and justice from so many conservative senators, it is absolutely crucial that we eliminate the filibuster. When we let a minority control the agenda, it means that we’re not allowing diverse perspectives to contribute to create intersectional, progressive policy. The filibuster suppresses marginalized voices in the Senate and oppresses marginalized communities across the country. We can no longer allow regressive ideas coming from a minority, sometimes of one, be an obstacle to our fair and equal vision of America.