In the U.S. Senate, a longstanding and controversial process called the filibuster enables the minority party to obstruct legislation by continuing debate, more or less ad infinitum, thus keeping a bill from coming to a vote. Any motion to shut off such debate must be passed by a three-fifths supermajority.
Because the filibuster-ers don’t have to keep talking steadily in order to obstruct passage—they can just threaten to—the procedure’s mere existence can kill laws that have much representative support. There are exceptions, but getting certain laws through the Senate nowadays effectively requires unanimous consent or a three-fifths majority, making it hard for the normal majority to pass legislation that the minority opposes. Though rarely actually carried out, the filibuster has thus come to pretty much define important parts of Senate procedure.
Some who condemn this anti-democratic situation see its origins in the institution of racial slavery. Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, for example, tweeted the other day “the filibuster was created so that slave owners could hold power over our government.”
There’s a tendency, partly tactical, I suspect, to trace the origins of every anti-democratic thing that people like me oppose—equal numbers of senators from each state, the electoral college, abuse of the filibuster—to the vile institution of slavery. The idea must be something like “Slavery is widely recognized as categorically worse than anything else in the country’s founding, and nobody can defend the filibuster once they see that they’re really defending slavery.”
However effective that angle may be in winning friends and influencing people—I doubt it’s effective at all—it’s led to something of a delusion regarding the original intent of the Senate rules that enable the filibuster.
You can always say that everything in the U.S. was enabled by slavery. You can even be right about that, but, if so, why bring up the filibuster, since everything else must also have the same evil origin? I’d like to leave aside for a moment the overarching idea that all things American originate in slavery and instead consider whether the creation of the filibuster has some particular relation to the promotion of racial slavery in the U.S.
It doesn’t seem to, really. Which doesn’t mean there’s no good argument against it.
For one thing, the trick goes way back. Cato the Younger was evidently a big filibuster guy, pushing off votes in the Roman Senateby refusing to stop speaking.
More relevant to our own Senate filibuster is Aaron Burr, being interesting, as always. Burr did enslave people, as did his famous rival Hamilton, but there’s no direct connection that I can see between his status as an enslaver, which in no way distinguishes him from most other men of his type, and what he did to enable the filibuster.