Filtration, a method of delaying or stopping the progress of a bill through prolonged speeches, developed in both houses of the United States Congress in the 19th century. The US House of Representatives got rid of filibuster at the end of this century. But in the Senate, filibuster became more common after Reconstruction.
Senate obstruction has been used by senators on a variety of issues, including the gold standard, the New Deal, and wartime production, to name a few. It has also been widely used against civil rights and voting rights bills. Here are six major bills that Senate obstruction helped kill in U.S. history.
1891: federal election bill
In 1890, the House of Representatives passed the Federal Elections Bill, which would have provided federal oversight of state elections that selected members of the House. The purpose of this bill was to ensure that black men in the south could vote in these elections. But he died in the Senate early in 1891, when Democratic senators conducted a week of filibustering against him.
Senators from the North “said they did not understand the intensity of Southerners’ opposition to the bill,” said Gregory Koger, chair of political science at the University of Miami and author of Systematic Obstruction: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate.
“I think they expected them to vote against it, and don’t like it,” he says. “But they did not foresee the ferocity with which senators would fight this bill.”
1922: Anti-lynching bill for dyers
One of the tactics white Southerners used to suppress black votes was lynching, and activists like Ida B. Wells have identified this connection in their campaigns to ban it. Congress began to introduce legislation mentioning lynching as early as 1901, but it was not until 1922 that an anti-lynching bill was passed in the House of Representatives.
This bill was the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, first introduced in 1918 by Congressman Leonidas C. Dyer, a Republican from Missouri. Senate Democrats obstructed the bill in 1922, 1923 and 1924, preventing it from being put to a vote in their chamber.
1934: Costigan-Wagner law against lynching
The anti-lynching crusade continued into the Great Depression with the support of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. However, her husband did not share her mission. Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt has said southerners in his party would obstruct New Deal legislation to death if he supported an anti-lynching law.
Whether this is true or not is debatable, as there were already a lot of systematic obstructions against New Deal bills (often these obstructions were intended to force an amendment to the bill in question or to force action. on another bill, rather than outright killing the legislation). Either way, Senate Democrats used filibuster to kill the Costigan-Wagner anti-lynching bill introduced in 1934; and in 1938, they killed the Wagner-Van Nuys anti-lynching bill with a 30-day obstruction.
4.1942: anti-tax bill
As the civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, many white southern senators focused their obstructions on civil rights bills. One example was a bill first introduced in 1942 that dealt with the voting tax. These taxes, which required citizens to pay a tax before they could vote, had a disproportionate impact on registered black voters. Southern senators filibustered the bill and continued to block the passage of anti-election bills for the remainder of the decade.
5. 1946: Fair Employment Practices Bill
In 1946, Senate Democrats also used filibuster to kill a fair employment practices bill. During World War II, FDR used an executive order to create a Fair Employment Practices Commission. But because it expired after the war, Congress drafted a new bill to make employment discrimination illegal.
In reality, the bill only made wartime policy permanent, says William P. Jones, professor of history at the University of Minnesota and signatory of the Scholars for Reform open letter.
“It looked like it would pass – there was majority support for this bill,” Jones says. But the minority of senators who opposed it successfully stopped it with an obstruction. Supporting Senators reintroduced a fair employment practices bill “in nearly every Senate between 1946 and 1964, and it continues to be defeated, until it is included in the Civil Rights Act. from 1964 “.
6. 1970: amendment to abolish the electoral college
The 1950s and 1960s were a turning point in which some important civil rights laws survived filibuster. Strom Thurmond’s 24-hour record obstruction – the longest continuous obstruction by a single person – failed to stop the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. The systematic obstruction of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 also did not prevent the passage of this legislation.
There was a momentum during this period that led Washington, DC to gain the right to vote for president and elect its own mayor and city council (which it had not been able to do during century), and a “constituency revolution” at the Supreme Court that helped make constituencies more equitably representative. In this climate, the United States almost abolished the Electoral College, an indirect voting system originally designed to give more power to the southern states due to their large population of enslaved blacks.
In September 1969, the House of Representatives voted 338 to 70 in favor of a constitutional amendment that would have abolished the Electoral College. The huge margin by which the vote was won reflected the fact that, according to a 1968 Gallup poll, 80% of Americans believed that American citizens should directly elect their president.
Yet in 1970 a group of southern senators managed to kill the bill by obstructing it. More than 50 years later, the Electoral College remains the way the United States elects its president and vice president.
