I hate to say it, but it’s time to kill the filibuster.

I’m old and I put a very high value on tradition in both my religious life and political life, so when Dems talk about abolishing the filibuster, I worry. Mainly, I worry about the damage that will befall us when the tables turn and the R’s are in control of a Senate without the filibuster. On the other hand, I worry that the folks who brought us Jim Crow are now launching an all-out assault on voting rights at a time when the Supreme Court isn’t, shall we say, distinguishing itself.

I decided to do my homework to be sure I had the facts I needed to make an informed decision (radical as that may sound). I started at the beginning. To all of those “strict constructionists” out there, the evidence is quite clear that the Founding Fathers spent a lot of time weighing the merits of protecting the minority versus the ability to govern. Ultimately, they decided that obstructionism was the greater risk. Take a look at this brief history from Brookings.

Voters in line in Georgia in June, 2020 (Credit: Emma Hurt/WABE)

Better yet, (may every teacher in my past forgive me), read the Cliff Notes. In Federalist Paper #22, Hamilton asserts that one of the key reasons the Articles of Confederation failed was the disproportionate amount of power wielded by the minority (in that case it was Rhode Island; today it is Wyoming) to block the will of the majority. It was a formula, Hamilton believed, that was doomed to fail.

The traditionalist in me was surprised to learn that the filibuster didn’t enter the Senate rules until the 20th Century. The civil rights movement started gaining a little traction in the 1890s in the form of support for bills that would ban lynching and poll taxes. Segregationists (they actually referred to themselves that way!) discovered that an obscure Senate rule to call for cloture -that is, to close off debate- could be used to thwart progressive efforts. The filibuster was born in 1917, and Jim Crow segregationists used it all the way up to 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was finally passed. Since then, the Republican Party has remained the guardian of white privilege, while the Democratic Party has become the party of inclusion.

This is not a small point given that we are now squaring off against the Trump Party. Former Harry Reid COS Adam Jentleson argues on David Plouffe’s podcast, The Battleground, that when Trumpists say they won the election, they are saying that they won the most votes cast by white people; they place no value on votes cast by anyone else. Doesn’t that sum up where we are today?

As I mentioned, the whole Republican establishment -both Trumpists and Institutionalists- are attacking voting rights with renewed vigor. They believe that voter suppression plus the gerrymandering that will follow the 2020 census in the 30 states that are fully controlled by R’s will be their ticket to taking back the House and Senate in 2022. We need a new voting rights act -the John Lewis Voting Rights Act- and we will not be able to get it with the filibuster in place.

Don’t take my word for it. Take two minutes to watch President Barack Obama make the case at the funeral of John Lewis.

Here are some hard truths. (1) This SCOTUS will not protect us from voter suppression, or Jim Crow Redux. (2) The filibuster inherently favors Conservatives who want to conserve the status quo by blocking change over Progressives who want to bring change. That’s what it is designed to do. (3) We have a very small window to get things done post-COVID and pre-midterm elections. (4) When the R’s re-take the Senate, they will get rid of the filibuster in a heartbeat if it serves their interests. The only reason they didn’t do it sooner was that Mitch McConnell thought it was useful to keep it as a buffer against the craziest of Trump’s schemes.

Bottom line, the filibuster is not part of the original institution of the Senate, its dominant effect has been to block civil rights and voting rights, it’s more suited to R’s than Dems, and if we don’t kill it now, they will kill it to support Jim Crow Redux, or as they call it, voter protection. Let’s do the hard stuff we need to do to maintain our democracy. That’s what Democrats do. Let’s kill the filibuster now.