ABC News did a blurb on the radio the other night about the rules change vote expected to occur in the senate and mentioned that although liberals want to use the filibuster now, it was conservatives who used it back in the sixties to try to block liberal civil rights legislation.
This was deceptive for two reasons. First, the earlier filibuster was employed to block legislation, not judicial nominees. Legislation is what the filibuster was originally intended to be used for. More egregiously, what the ABC reporter fails to tell his listeners is that those who tried to block civil rights legislation were largely Democrats. Robert Byrd, William Fulbright, Al Gore, Sr. and others resisted advances in civil rights by using the filibuster. To call these Democrats conservatives is ludicrous.
