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Mitch McConnell, the minority leader of the U.S. Senate, has for six years wielded the filibuster as a weapon in his rebellion against a founding principle of the United States of America – self-governance by majority rule.

McConnell’s revolt shows he believes Americans cannot govern themselves because, basically, he thinks the majority of Americans are wrongheaded. As any monarch would, he believes the minority is justified in overriding and ruling over the majority.

McConnell is the filibuster king, master of all that he and his minority minions can obstruct. With the filibuster, he zealously bludgeoned to death bills passed by a majority in the House and supported by a majority in the Senate. What was intended to be a precision tool McConnell brandished as a machine gun, murdering all majority-supported legislation in sight. Filibuster is derived from the Dutch word for thieving pirates. It is the minority stealing voting rights from the majority.

In the olden days, like during the time of the Clinton administration and earlier, the filibuster was rarely and judiciously used by both Democrat and Republican minorities. It was hauled out of the Senate parliamentary rules bin only when the measures under consideration were fairly monumental.

The 1957 Civil Rights bill was such a deal. South Carolina Senator and segregationist Strom Thurmond set the filibuster record opposing this measure intended to provide equal voting rights for black people. Thurmond knew there were sufficient votes in the Senate to pass it – that would be 51, a simple majority. But it would take a supermajority – 67 votes at that time – for the Senate to stop debate about it, essentially to shut him up, and anyone else who would join him, and move to a vote on the bill itself. He was probably right in thinking proponents of the bill could not muster 67 votes to stop him.

Thurmond failed, however, because he couldn’t go on after 24 hours of talking and no other Senator stepped forward to continue his tirade against civil rights. The Senate passed the bill 62-15 two hours after Thurmond voluntarily stopped talking.

Just short of 20 years later, the Senate made it easier to end a filibuster by cutting to 60 the number of votes needed to end debate. But the Senate has also made it much easier to conduct a filibuster. It no longer compels obstructionists to do any work. All they have to do now is call a filibuster. They don’t have to actually stand up and talk. At all. Ever. It’s a silent filibuster. It’s a go-home-and-put-your-feet-up-after-stopping-the-work-of-the-majority filibuster.

And those lazy, silent filibusters have increased dramatically under king McConnell. Republicans have pulled 348 go-home-and-put-your-feet-up filibusters since Democrats became the majority party in the Senate six years ago. In just the two years of 2009 and 2010, Republicans pulled more of these lazy, silent filibusters than the total number of filibusters that occurred in the two decades of the 1950s and 1960s.

Filibuster power has so gone to the head of king McConnell that last week, he filibustered a measure that he had proposed just hours before.

King McConnell’s successful obstruction has meant that Americans who elected Democrats as the majority party in both the House and Senate in 2008 did not get legislation that the majority of Americans supported then and continue to support now. Dylan Matthews of The Washington Post listed 17 measures that likely would have become law except for the filibuster. Among them were a bill that would have required corporations to disclose their political spending, a measure to end the Bush tax cut for the rich and repeal of special tax deals and subsidies for oil companies. (more…)

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

Obviously, I agree with all of today’s criticism of Rand Paul about his extremist position on the Civil Rights Act. However, let’s be very clear here: Many Democrats (and, of course, most Republicans) support our system of laws that lets employers and private businesses discriminate against employees and customers for all sorts of other, non-racial reasons.

Let’s stick for a moment to employment, as just the best example. Today, there is only one state in the nation that is not technically an “at-will employment” state (Montana). But everywhere else, unless you have a private party or union contract that says otherwise, you are an “at-will” employee, which means that your employer can fire you at will for any reason not explicitly protected under state law or in the Civil Rights Act (the federal protected classes are listed here).

So yes, as outrageous as it sounds, it’s true: right now, many if not most Americans can be fired if their employer doesn’t like the sports team they root for. Or if their boss doesn’t like their choice of tie on a given day. Or if their boss hates their new glasses. Or, in many states without non-discrimination statutes, if their boss doesn’t like their sexual orientation. You get the point.

Obviously, I don’t think this reality is a good thing at all — but I am saying that Paul’s position*, while offensive and extreme, is merely an extrapolated position of many “mainstream” so-called “pro-business” Democrats and Republicans in Congress who would call “just cause” legislation (ie. mandating that an employer have a “just cause” for firing you) “radical.” As just one example, here in Colorado, leading Democrats in 2008 lined up to oppose a “just cause” ballot initiative.

Considering they haven’t used their congressional majorities to expand the Civil Rights Act, Democrats have basically decided to draw the line in the sand on protected classes at the status quo (race, gender, age and religion — all of which, let me reiterate, should and must remain protected classes). And that’s certainly more than you can say for Rand Paul and the libertarian movement he represents. But when you start really looking at employment/discrimination law, you find that by omission, those same Democrats expressing outrage at Paul’s position are perfectly fine with a largely deregulated labor market that lets employers fire and discriminate against you for all sorts of preposterous reasons.

This is the unspeakable taboo in the whole discussion about Rand Paul in the Democratic-aligned “progressive” media — taboo because to acknowledge it is to admit just how owned by corporate interests “mainstream” Democrats and Republicans really are. Again, Paul is extreme and offensive in his extremism, but he’s just degrees more extreme than so many “centrist”/”pro-business” lawmakers of both parties.

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David Sirota is the bestselling author of the books “Hostile Takeover” (2006) and “The Uprising” (2008). E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota. This is his latest column for Creators Syndicate