Senate Democrats Use The 'Jim Crow Filibuster' To Protect The Kremlin
WTflyingbackwardsF?
Speaking at the funeral of Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) in May, 2020, former President Barack Obama called for the elimination of the Senate filibuster, which he maligned as “another Jim Crow relic.” During his four years in the Senate, Obama himself used that Jim Crow relic on two dozen occasions to block the Republican majority from bringing various bills to a floor vote.
In 2005, Obama's second year in the Senate, Republicans — furious that Senate Democrats were using the filibuster to block President Bush's judicial appointments — proposed the "nuclear option” to eliminate the 60-vote requirement for judicial appointments. In response, the junior Senator from Illinois took to the floor of the Senate and delivered one of his trademarked impassioned speeches in defense of this Jim Crow relic, railing against the unfairness of “one party, be it Republican or Democrat.
Filibuster hypocrisy of this sort is the norm in Washington. In 2017, when Senate Democrats were in the minority under President Trump, 32 of them signed a letter urging that the filibuster be maintained on the ground that it is necessary to safeguard “the existing rights and prerogatives of Senators to engage in full, robust, and extended debate as we consider legislation before this body in the future." Fast forward four years, when the Democrats have a 50-50 majority in the Senate with the tie-breaking vote of the Vice President, and now that very same filibuster has been transformed by them from a sacred guardian of minoritarian rights into the tell-tale sign of white nationalism and fascist contempt for democratic values.
Shortly after Biden was inaugurated, he announced that those sanctions would be lifted and the U.S. would cease its efforts to impede completion of Nord Stream 2. In other words, it was Trump — depicted for years by an unhinged U.S. media and their Democratic allies as an obedient blackmail victim of Russia — who did everything possible to prevent this pipeline from being built (while simultaneously arming the Ukrainians against Moscow). It was Biden who lifted those sanctions and acknowledged that the U.S. would no longer take steps to block it — a huge gift to Putin, even if his motive, as he claimed, was to avoid conflict with the Germans. And now it is Senate Democrats — ignoring the pleas of the Ukrainians, who view Nord Stream 2 as a grave threat, and at the behest of the Biden White House — who are so eager to block sanctions against this Russian company that they are using the filibuster to prevent Cruz’s bill from passing even though it is supported by 55% of U.S. Senators, at exactly the same time they are trying to convince Americans that only racists use the filibuster, a relic of Jim Crow, and that democracy requires the approval of all bills that attract the support of fifty Senators.
I personally regard efforts to stop Nord Stream 2 and punish the companies involved as absurd and irrational. Aside from the obvious futility of it (how can the U.S. prevent Germany from buying natural gas from Russia if it wants?), what right does the U.S. have to try to prevent this? Why should the U.S. try to arrogate unto itself the power to dictate to whom Russia can sell its natural gas and from whom Germany and the rest of Europe can buy it? There is nothing wrong with attempting to persuade the Germans that it is in their interest to buy it from U.S. companies, but using various forms of coercion and force to stop it has always been extremely ill-advised and destined to fail. So I, too, would have opposed Sen. Cruz's sanctions bill.
^ Killcen agrees with this free market principle of consumer choice and fair competition too! Wish we had MOAR of that in America these days!
