After the White House declined to comment on the obstruction debate on Friday, MP Ayanna Pressley did not take a word on her position.
“It’s past time to end the Jim Crow Filibuster,” wrote the Massachusetts “Squad” member on Twitter.
With the 50-50 Senate split and Vice President Kamala Harris offering a tiebreak vote, minority leader Senator Mitch McConnell has struggled to get majority leader Chuck Schumer to drop the 60 vote barrier to end the debate on most of the legislation.
Barack Obama reported the obstruction to Jim Crow at a memorial service for the iconic Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga.
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“Do you want to honor John? We will honor him by revitalizing the law by which he was willing to die,” said Obama referring to the Voting Rights Act. “And if all of this requires the elimination of the obstructionist – another relic of Jim Crow – to guarantee the God-given rights of every American, then that is what we must do.”
But the obstruction is not linked to the Jim Crow era. In 1805, Vice President Aaron Burr, presiding over the Senate, removed what he believed to be a redundant language from the Senate rule book and cut the “motion from the previous question” that would have allowed most lawmakers to end the debate and force a vote on an account. Senators throughout the 19th and 20th centuries tried to reinstate the motion from the previous question, but their opponents would kill it for obstruction.
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It took until 1917 for the Senate to enact a “blocking” rule, taking away the power of a single senator or group of senators to prevent debate on their own. Since then, a new rule has allowed two-thirds of senators to agree to interrupt the debate and bring a bill to the floor. This fraction was changed to three fifths in 1975.
Some historians say the obstruction has been used to obstruct civil rights legislation in the past, but more recently, the bolder members of both parties have asked to eliminate it.
President Trump has repeatedly intimidated McConnell about the current obstruction rule for legislation, when Republicans had only a 51-49 lead in the Senate.
Bypassing the obstruction can be done by a majority of just 50 plus one if Senate Democrats decide to do so. This is what Democrats did, using a “nuclear option” for appointments to lower courts during the term of ex-President Obama, and what Republicans did for appointments to the Supreme Court during President Trump’s term.
While McConnell and Schumer discuss the division of power in their divided Senate, the plan remains at an impasse on the issue of obstruction.
“I was excited to hear my colleague say that he wants the same rules of the 2000s to apply today. Because certainly 20 years ago there was no talk of overthrowing long-standing minority rights over the legislation,” McConnell said in a speech on Thursday . “Legislative obstruction is a crucial part of the Senate. Leading Democrats like President Biden himself have long championed it.”
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McConnell then accused Democrats of “liberally” using obstruction to block Republican legislation during the past six years that Republicans have controlled the Senate. Democrats did this on notable occasions in 2020, when Republicans introduced police reform legislation and coronavirus aid projects that Democrats did not consider ambitious enough.
Fox News’ Tyler Olson contributed to this report.