National Urban League blasts "The Filibuster Fig Leaf"

[beaconess]

The Filibuster Fig Leaf

by Marc Morial, President, National Urban League

Proponents pushing the current effort to eliminate the 60-vote filibuster for judicial nominations in the Senate have sought to cloak their claims with references to the historic civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. But, as the president and CEO of the National Urban League, one of the nation’s oldest and most respected civil rights organizations, I say to America: Don’t believe the hype!

The filibuster, despite its checkered past, was and remains an important tool to protect the rights of the minority party, whether Democratic or Republican—and it’s one of the things that make the Senate the greatest deliberative body in the world. Yes, the filibuster was used to temporarily thwart civil rights legislation—as when Sen. Strom Thurmond staged the longest filibuster in Senate history in 1957.

But that obstructionism was overcome by the bipartisan effort to ensure that all Americans should enjoy full rights of citizenship. When the Senate’s rules made achieving the goals of the civil rights movement tougher, civil rights advocates didn’t propose throwing out the rules to get their way. They just worked harder with Senate giants like Everett Dirksen, the Illinois Republican, and Lyndon Johnson, the Texas Democrat, to win the old fashioned way: by earning it honestly.

How many of the Senators who now claim that the “nuclear option” is a blow for civil rights demanded an up-or-down vote on the 2004 Fairness Act, one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation in years? The Fairness Act—which would have guaranteed equal access to publicly-funded services, protection for older workers, remedies for on-the-job discrimination, and equal pay for women in the workforce—languished and eventually died in the Senate, the victim of the leadership’s failure to allow a vote. And now, some seek to discard a time-tested Senate tradition and principle of democracy in order to promote judges with a proven hostility toward civil rights.

<snip>
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050520/the_filibuster_fig_leaf.php

[beaconess]

1. kick