Thread by @JohnJHarwood

from Robert Caro's Master of the Senate, about LBJ:

"there took place therefore so many 'extended discussions' of measures to keep them from coming to a vote that the device got a name, 'filibuster,' from the Dutch word vrijbuiter, which means 'freebooter' or 'pirate'..."

/1

"...and which passed into the Spanish as filibustero, because the sleek, swift ship used by Caribbean pirates was called a filibote, and into legislative parlance because the device was, after all, a pirating, or hijacking of the very heart of the legislative process..."

/2

"Like seniority, filibustering became a tool of the South early on..."

/3

"One day in 1922, the Senate was about to take up a bill designed to stop lynching.

"Tall, courtly Pat Harrison of Mississippi sauntered up to the dais, and asked Parliamentarian Watkins if...so long as he was discussing the Journal on the floor, cloture could 't be imposed"

/4

"Watkins told Harrison that was indeed the case, and Harrison and other Southerners thereupon discussed the Journal, keeping from the Senate floor not only the anti-lynching bill but any bill, until the bill's sponsors gave up and withdrew it."

/5

"Of all the areas in which the Senate failed America, it failed most memorably on...the single most important issue of the time: race.

"So strong was the South, w/its conservative allies...it let the bills come to the floor and filibustered them there, confident that..."

/6

"...civil rights proponents could not muster the two-thirds vote necessary to impose cloture.

"While shame could move the House, however, it couldn't budge the Senate."

/7