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No one likes the Electoral College, expect perhaps those who were elected because of it. No one likes gerrymandering, except those doing the gerrymandering. No one likes the filibuster, except those doing the filibustering.
The power of the silent filibuster to distort Senate politics is now accepted on Capitol Hill and by the press as normal and not worth mentioning. Let me be the skunk at this political garden party and say this stinks. Representative government was not designed to work this way by the Founding Fathers.
There are two ways of looking at the talking filibuster. My way is as a form of unanimous consent.
It used to be in the Senate that if you were filibustering, you stood up. There was a physical dimension to it, that you - when you became exhausted you would have to leave the floor. That was the idea of the filibuster.
We demand that segregation be ended in every school district in the year 1963! We demand that we have effective civil rights legislation - no compromise, no filibuster - and that include public accommodations, decent housing, integrated education, FEPC and the right to vote.
They say that women talk too much. If you have worked in Congress you know that the filibuster was invented by men.
Voter suppression laws, overzealous filibuster use, you name it - the Republicans use every tactic they can to stop our democracy from actually selecting the person with the most support.
In the first 50 years of the filibuster, it was used only 35 times. But the last Congress alone had 112 cloture motions filed, plus threats of more. This is the tyranny of the minority.
You know, the purpose of reconciliation is to avoid the filibuster. The filibuster is an effort to talk something to death.
The House of Representatives eliminated the filibuster way back in the 19th century, and somehow it managed to survive.