Race and the Insurrection

One thing leads to another.

Bloody Sunday, by Ted Ellis — Wikimedia

It started with race.

A democratic republic is a delicate piece of machinery. One of our Founders’ greatest challenges, stated perhaps a tad cynically, was to protect the mob without empowering it. The Senate was designed for that purpose, giving political interests with smaller population bases — agriculture, say, vs. manufacturing — voting power disproportionate to their numbers, and providing six-year terms that allowed legislation to “work” or not before senators would be judged on it.

Of the Senate’s minority protections, the crown jewel is the filibuster. But for so powerful a tool to be viable, it must be used sparingly. And for a time, it was. Before 1970, senators seeking to mount a filibuster had to show up and stand up. More important, they had to take the political heat for putting a broom through the spokes of government, because everything else on the Senate’s agenda stopped while the filibuster continued.

The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. The Voting Rights Act was passed a year later, in response to Bloody Sunday. Both acts faced filibusters. Both filibusters were eventually overcome, but together they started a chain of events that I believe brought rioters to the Capitol fifty-five years later. The key event, provoked by the civil rights…