CULTURE Minority Rule
South, led by South Carolina Sen. John C. Calhoun, sought to protect slavery by asserting the right of states to nullify federal laws. This also failed. Then in 1841, Calhoun and his allies invented the precursor to the modern filibuster—the tac-
legacy persists to this day. With the crushing of Reconstruction in 1877 and the adoption of state Jim Crow laws to keep Blacks subservient, Southern politicians feared another burst of federal civil rights legislation. They regularly resorted to Calhoun’s tactic of talking a bill to death. Only in 1917 was the modern filibuster formalized with the enactment of Rule 22, giving the Senate the right to cut off debate with a twothirds vote. This was intended to limit the traditional talking filibuster. But ironically, the
tic of holding the Senate floor indefinitely to kill a bill. Despite delays, however, the Senate still functioned by majority rule. The republic literally came apart over what was meant by minority rights. After decades of failed compromises, it took a Civil War to settle the question of slavery. But the race issue was far from settled, and Calhoun’s
rule gave the Southern minority just the weapon they needed: If they could muster just one-third of the Senate, they could block any legislation. From 1877 until 1964, Jentleson notes, “the only bills that were stopped by filibusters were civil rights bills.” Invoking cloture for the first time to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 71 senators who
Given the Republican ferocity in trying to destroy basic rights, the road back to democracy is not civic but political. BY R O BE R T K U T T N E R B
MEG KINNARD / AP PHOTO
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s Republicans have increasingly become a permanent minority in America, they have resorted to ever cruder schemes to cling to power. This destruction of democracy has been intertwined with the effort to maintain white supremacy as nonwhites became a growing share of the population. The filibuster is both the emblem and the instrument of this minority rule, as well as the connection between slavery, Jim Crow, and today’s strategically racist Republican Party. Adam Jentleson’s excellent Kill Switch traces the central role of the filibuster as a vehicle both for racial suppression and for Republican minority rule. From the beginning of the American republic, as Jentleson recounts, slaveholding states promoted anti-majority provisions for fear that some future national government might try to limit slavery. In the twisted ideology of the Southern slaveholding elite, they and not subjugated Blacks were the aggrieved minority whose rights had to be protected from a majority that didn’t appreciate the South’s “peculiar institution.” The founders of the republic included multiple checks and balances, Jentleson notes, but the filibuster was not among them. The Articles of Confederation, requiring votes of twothirds of the states for national legislation, had been a disaster. At the Constitutional Convention, Southern delegates tried to replicate some of this weakness piecemeal. They “pushed for a provision requiring a
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supermajority to pass all legislation governing interstate commerce and the navigation of waterways,” Jentleson writes. This was rejected. A supermajority, Hamilton warned in Federalist 22, “is one of those refinements which, in practice, A statue of pro-slavery South Carolina Sen. John C. Calhoun is lifted out of Charleston in June 2020.
has an effect the reverse of what is expected from it in theory.” He added, prophetically, that the result would be “tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good.” Yet today, the filibuster is treated by its defenders as if it were part of the Constitution. In the Jacksonian era, the
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