Democats and the Filibuster

From its inception, the Democratic Party has kept blacks under its iron control. In their glory days, the Democrats were the party of slavery. Then, those waskily Wepublicans came along and ruined all that. So, the Democrats became the party of segregation, black codes, lynch law, and Jim Crow. Once again, the Republicans stepped in to put an end to the Democrats' fun, but the GOP's reforms were delayed for decades. One of the favorite Democratic tools to prevent the spread of civil rights is the filibuster. The filibuster is, by definition, the use of obstructionist tactics to delay legislative action. The legislation being blocked can be good or bad, depending on one's point of view. The historical reality is that the filibuster was the means by which the Democrats blocked federal civil rights legislation for many decades after a majority of Congress favored it. One practitioner was Sen. Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, an avowed white supremacist. In 1947, Sen. Bilbo faced charges of pocketing campaign money and intimidating black voters during his re-election campaign of the previous year. Bilbo wasn't sworn in, even though colleagues launched a filibuster that threatened to paralyze the Senate until he was allowed to take his seat. Bilbo died of cancer before the matter could be resolved. A decade later, Democrat Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina held the floor for 24 hours and 18 minutes – still the Senate record for a one-man filibuster -- in attempt to block the Civil Rights Act of 1957. After Thurmond's filibuster, the bill passed in a weakened form. Filibusters continued to block serious civil rights legislation right up until 1964, when the Senate was finally able to muster the two-thirds majority that was then required to end debate. The last to filibuster against the landmark 1964 legislation was Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia The former Ku Klux Klan Kleagle spoke for 14 hours and 13 minutes, finishing the morning of June 10 – the 57th day of debate on the measure. It is one of the ironies of US politics that the NAACP, which was founded by Republicans, and lobbied so long for the 1964 civil rights bill, is currently lobbying to save the filibuster. In a recent "action alert," the NAACP said that eliminating the filibuster would allow "right-wing extremists to be confirmed to lifetime appointments on the federal bench." Were it not for those "right-wing extremists," one wonders what the condition of the African race in this country would be today. Would they still be slaves? Democrats hold blacks today in chains of promises, lies and ideology as tightly as they did in chains of iron 140 years ago. In fact, they are probably more successful, since fewer blacks today run from the Democratic Party than tried to escape from slavery. There is no Underground Railway for wannabe black Republicans. Those who do choose the "wrong" side are pelted with racial epithets such as" lawn jockey," "sell-out," "house nigga," and are pelted with Oreo cookies -- by people of their own race!! The Democrats know that if Republican judges get on the bench, once again their plans to keep minorities under their thumb will be foiled. Just last week, Florida's Supreme Court struck down the state's school voucher program that allowed some students to attend private schools with taxpayers' money, a key component of Gov. Jeb Bush's education reforms. In a 5-2 decision, the high court ruled the 6-year-old program undermines a constitutional mandate to provide an adequate and uniform system of public education by pulling taxpayer money away from public schools and giving it to private ones that are not held to the same standards. In other words, Democrats can't afford to let poor and minority students to go private schools that still teach American history and won't gloss over their crimes against humanity. They don't want schools to educate, they want schools to indoctrinate. They want to maintain a wide gap between their own children and the children of the underprivelaged. If those chains are ever broken, the Democrats will cease to exist. And the world will be a better place. That's why they cling to the filibuster.