Democrats Keep Hiding Behind The Filibuster

To enact any kind of meaningful protections against a string of right-wing Supreme Court decisions, the Democrats will need to do away with the filibuster.

By William Rivers Pitt, Truthout

There is but one true thing to be said of a country whose highest court, from which there is no recourse and almost fully staffed by a fanatical majority appointed by two presidents who lost the popular vote, sweeps aside the hard-fought rights of half its residents in a day. There is one thing to be said of a country whose Congress permits the ongoing existence of the filibuster, a tool originally concocted to protect slave-owners that is now deployed daily to empower and continue the tyranny of the minority. There is one thing to say of a country whose Democratic Party leadership has become so ossified and bereft of ideas that all they can think to do after half that country lost their rights is to fundraise off the outrage.

The one true thing? That country is a living nightmare.

The defining image from Friday’s appalling Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the epitaph for that vital law, will forever be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi standing before reporters, her body contracted into an elaborate shrug as she said, “What is going on here?” Nothing better captures the state of Democratic Party leadership. The Party professed for 50 years to be the defenders of Roe, but in that 50 years did nothing of substance to keep this grim moment at arm’s length. Now, we are here.

“It didn’t take a weatherman to know Roe was in trouble,” I wrote back in May after the Alito draft dropped, “and yet the Democrats spent all these years staring at it like a deer pinned by oncoming headlights, relentlessly confident that five far right political hack Supreme Court justices wouldn’t finally do what the Republican Party has been vowing to do since the year after I was born.”