Jimmy Stewart engages an iconic filibuster in “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington“
Americans love political simplicity. It is a yearning that, paradoxically, serves as both a hallmark of our national character and a profound vulnerability. Although laws can be extremely complex, simplicity in our politics is a disease that can be contagious and frequently is ushered into Washington and our state capitols by candidates who lack the depth and experience necessary for true leadership.
Gone are the days of Lincoln and Douglas and their like that guide our discourse. Such towering intellects are all too rare in today’s political landscape.”
Kamala Harris wanted to remove the filibuster so that she could convince the Congress to slip through a statute reimposing Roe v Wade. Harris’ anti-filibuster view on abortion topics was simply a “me too” carryover from President Joe Biden. In June 2022 he suggested the same thing – killing the Senate’s filibuster rule in order to pass a federal bill allowing abortions nationwide with just 51% of the Senate vote. Democrats don’t like the idea of state legislatures deciding abortion policy.
Further, the same argument – set aside the Senate’s filibuster rule — was made in 2021 by Biden to ram through national voting laws. If nobody could debate such laws at length, point out their false ideas and flaws, which party do you think the Democrat law would favor?
Besides, the Harris idea of tossing out the filibuster has been tried before and it was Democrats who regretted it most. Democrats did away with the filibuster in 2013 for all of Obama’s federal court nominees except the Supreme Court. Republicans could not filibuster a court nominee, no matter how unqualified. In 2017, with Trump as President and Republicans in charge of the Senate and claiming Obama’s 2013 rule change as precedent, the filibuster was entirely discarded for Trump’s Supreme Court nominees. Democrats were unable to debate the nominees so instead, Democrats created the Kavanaugh sideshow, allegations by outside agitators of alleged sexual improprieties by Kavanaugh when he was a teenager. Then Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination was buffeted by allegations she was part of a Catholic group that promotes misogyny.
What Democrats don’t seem to realize, or don’t care, is snakes can bite in all directions. If there were no filibuster, then if the pro-life people get 51 votes and have a sympathetic President, they could repeal any abortion statute and impose a statute limiting abortions nationwide. Senate Democrats could not stand up and oppose it.
Harris’ filibuster announcement cost her the support of at least one Democrat Senator – West Virginia’s Joe Manchin. He and Democrat Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona were two Democrat Senators opposed to Harris’ idea.
To fight the possibility of our own government falling into mob rule, our founding fathers, especially James Madison, watched the French experiment with dread. When designing our two-house bicameral legislature, the House of Representatives, whose representation was based on state population, was assumed to be a rats nest of limitless ideas, some of them horribly bad. Pure democracy is like watching flocks of geese circle and fly in different directions, trying to get their bearings for migration. The constitution made it hard to enact laws, intentionally. As former Harvard Law School Dean John Manning wrote, “by dividing the legislative process among three institutions answering to distinct constituencies, the bicameralism and presentment requirements [of Article I, Section 7] … in effect create a supermajority requirement.”
Filibustering, and ending a filibuster to allow a vote, were not part of the constitution ratified in 1789, nor was it part of the first ten amendments to the constitution submitted to the states in 1791. The filibuster, a procedural rule of the Senate, gave political minorities input into bills promoted by an overbearing majority. Its first use was 1806 but really didn’t catch on until the mid-1800s. Most uses of the filibuster have come in the 20th and 21st centuries. To overcome unlimited debate on issues, early Senates had to wait until long-winded senators ran out of steam. The running-out-of-steam end of a filibuster can be seen in the old Jimmy Stewart movie, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”
Harris wasn’t the only Washingtonian with a weirdness concerning filibusters. Former President Obama claimed at the 2020 funeral of black Congressman John Lewis that the filibuster was another Jim Crow relic that should be junked. Although Mr. Obama was the first African American editor of the Harvard Law Review, he should have spent more time on constitutional history. Racial segregation laws – Jim Crow laws — came from state legislatures in the South after post-civil war Reconstruction failed in 1876, not from Congress or the U. S. Senate. Nor has the Senate ever given Jim Crow laws a thumbs up. Ah, but trust the legacy media and broadcasters give to catchy phrases conveniently overlook the messy reality of history.
The Civil Rights Act. Filibusters aren’t forever and don’t always stop unwanted legislation. Sometimes it is important that filibusters be circumvented. Current rules allow it. A excellent example of busting a “negative” filibuster –where a group of senators are talking a bill to death and the bill’s proponents want to end the filibuster so the Senate could vote — concerned the most important legislation of the 20th century — the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Civil rights were a major campaign issue in the close 1960 election. Civil Rights was in the Democrat platform but utterly detested by Southern Democrat Senators. They wanted no changes to state civil rights laws.
In August 1963, King’s moving “I Have A Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, became the catalyst and focus for the modern civil rights efforts. Seven in ten black citizens who could vote voted for John Kennedy over Richard Nixon. For three months in 1961 the Kennedy administration put together coalitions for a strong civil rights push. Then Lee Harvey Oswalt shot Kennedy.
Lyndon Johnson’s administration introduced and pushed the Civil Rights Act hard, as a memorial to Kennedy. The CRA was heavily favored by Republicans and Democrats in the House of Representatives, but southern Senate Democrats vowed ”massive resistance” to the Act. Ending a filibuster would be crucial. LBJ was the master when it came to twisting arms in the Senate, but he had no luck with his Southern Democrat friends in 1964. Not on civil rights.
As Arthur Schlesinger Jr., wrote in “The Thousand Days,” describing Kennedy’s short administration, the murder of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney by the KKK in Mississippi exploded nationally in June 1964. These civil rights martyrs aroused the nation and gave new strength to the effort. But these killings did not stop the Southern Senator filibuster. Democrat Senator Mike Mansfield, the leader of the Senate, had to go to moderate Republicans senators to get enough votes to force a cloture of the filibuster. According to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson persuaded Republican Senate leader Everett Dirksen to “be with him on civil rights.” Johnson promised Dirksen deification. “Dirksen,” LBJ supposedly said, “you come with me on this bill and two hundred years from now school children will know only two names: Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen.”
Senate Republican leaders Dirksen and Jacob Javits told Mansfield they could get the Republican votes to close down the Democrat filibuster. But as former Republican Ohio Congressman Charles Whalen wrote in his book, The Longest Debate, Dirksen didn’t want to just “go with” LBJ; Dirksen wanted the Democrat President of the United States to publicly give full credit for getting the civil rights act passed to Republicans. LBJ had wanted Democrats to get the all the glory. Dirksen demanded the glory be shared.
Javits and Dirksen did their part. After 60 days, with Republican help, cloture was invoked on June 10, 1964. There were 71 votes to close the filibuster, 27 of the 33 Republicans going with Dirksen. The filibuster having closed, final debate was had, the Civil Rights Act passed on July 2, 1964, and was signed. LBJ was boxed in. He had struck his deal with Mansfield and Dirksen. LBJ lived up to his promise, giving Republicans credit.
Then Dirksen’s agreement with LBJ was sabotaged from within. Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, soon to be 1964 Republican Presidential nominee, had voted against the bill, claiming he didn’t want the federal government in the role of enforcing racial desegregation laws. Thanks to Goldwater, Republicans have been tarred as the anti-civil rights party ever since 1964, even though left to their own devices Democrats would have killed the CRA.
In 2017, British broadcaster Mark Plotkin, offered a well-meaning but feeble-minded advice to us from across the pond.
“Without the [American] filibuster, senators in each party would be required to work the other side of the aisle — to find new friends; to convert foes and make them allies. Every bill and every appointment should be voted on the merits. That’s how a functioning democracy is supposed to work.”
Plotkin is wrong. The quality of laws and the comportment of Senators towards each other is not improved by changing the rules of the Senate. Laws enacted with or without filibusters do not result in laws that are more right or wrong.
Americans should be careful what we wish for. One never knows what horse hocky Congress may come up with that needs to be talked to death.
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Ron Smith – Special to The Informer
Dean Halliday Smith is a fifth generation Kansan, a retired attorney, a grandfather several times over, a Vietnam veteran, and a civil war historian. Territorial Kansas, the Civil War, and the post-Civil War west are his subjects of interest. Manhattan KS graduate, graduated Kansas Wesleyan in ’73. Worked on Governor John Carlin’s staff in 1980-81. Lobbied for the Kansas Bar Association for 14 years. His small farm is near where the historic Santa Fe Trail converged on the “Pawnee Fork” along the west route of the SFT.
