John Lewis funeral: Barack Obama calls for voting reform and filibuster’s end in rousing eulogy for civil rights hero

Griffin Connolly
·2 min read

Barack Obama supports ending the Senate's filibuster rule if that's what it takes to pass voting rights legislation, the former US president indicated during his eulogy for the late Congressman John Lewis on Thursday.

At his speech in Atlanta on Thursday, Mr Obama, the first black president in US history, advocated for several reforms to make it easier for Americans to vote, including:

  • making Election Day a federal holiday;

  • restoring voting rights to former prison inmates;

  • automatically registering people to vote when they turn 18 years old; and

  • full enfranchisement for the citizens of Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico, which currently lack statehood and thus representation in Congress.

"If all of this takes eliminating the filibuster, another Jim Crow relic, in order to secure the god given rights of every American, then that's what we should do," Mr Obama said.

The Senate filibuster is a longtime chamber rule that effectively requires 60 senators to pass any legislation instead of the simple majority outlined in the Constitution.

The rule has enjoyed bipartisan support for decades as a check on majority mob rule in the Senate, which American historians and lawmakers are fond of heralding as "the world's greatest deliberative body."

But Democrats have increasingly signalled their openness to ditching the rule if they regain a Senate majority after the 2020 elections and if Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden beats Donald Trump.

Even Mr Biden has indicated he may support doing away with the 60-vote threshold.

“It’s going to depend on how obstreperous [Senate Republicans] become” if they become the minority party, Mr Biden said earlier this month, the New York Times reported.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has vowed not to axe the filibuster rule so long as he is in power.

"On legislation... the Senate’s treasured tradition is not efficiency but deliberation," the Kentucky Republican wrote in an op-ed for the Times last summer.

"One of the body’s central purposes is making new laws earn broader support than what is required for a bare majority in the House," Mr McConnell wrote, arguing that while the legislative filibuster does not appear in the Constitution's text, it is "central to the order the Constitution sets forth" and is in line with what America's founding fathers would have wanted.

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