Andres Martinez writing in the LATimes:
The NAACP is lobbying to preserve the Senate's filibuster in Washington these days. What's next for the civil rights group? A campaign encouraging Southern pride in the Confederate flag? A fundraising drive to build more of those odious monuments to Robert E. Lee?
The filibuster, from the Dutch word for pirate, is a parliamentary move that allows a minority of senators to prevent the chamber from voting on a measure by indefinitely extending debate. The Senate filibuster dates back to the early 19th century, but the obstructionist tactic will always be associated with the efforts of the Senate's Southern Dixiecrats to block civil rights legislation in the 20th century. The effort was so successful for so long, as Robert Caro vividly recounts in his "Master of the Senate" tome on Lyndon B. Johnson, that the Senate was widely referred to as "the South's revenge for Gettysburg." The filibuster kept the federal government from combating racial lynchings, the poll tax and plenty of other outrages, which is why the NAACP's Washington office and liberal voices across the country used to rail against the filibuster as the ultimate perversion of American democracy.
It's now a perversion of history for the NAACP and these other liberal voices to champion the filibuster because it is temporarily convenient to do so.
I think he's a little hard on the filibuster. Its like saying that due process has helped a lot of criminals go on to commit other crimes; its true, but we probably need due process anyway. Now, however, every liberal outfit in the nation has done a double somersault over the filibuster. Its now got light shining on it like it was touched by an angel.
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