Pres. Obama wants to eliminate the filibuster

Former President Barack Obama recently spoke at civil rights hero John Lewis’s funeral, and if you read Slate you will learn his eulogy was literally “perfect.” Back in the real world, Obama raised a lot of eyebrows for using a funeral service to deliver a political jeremiad.

While Obama previously earned some measure of respect from his political opponents calling out “woke cancel culture,” what Obama said at Lewis’s funeral was a full-on endorsement of exactly the kind of left-wing radicalism that seeks to discredit and bully opponents rather than persuade them.

The big news from Obama’s speech was that Obama came out in favor of eliminating the filibuster. This is a politically questionable move in itself. Democrats want to eliminate the filibuster because they know they’ll never pass a radical agenda that includes things such as D.C. and Puerto Rican statehood to possibly give their party a permanent electoral advantage in Congress.

However, the real problem is how Obama chose to frame his opposition to the filibuster. Speaking about the prospect of passing a voting rights bill named after Lewis, Obama said: “And if all 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.”

Framing the filibuster as explicitly racist doesn’t appear to be an accident, either. Obama’s words were carefully considered and already it appears that it’s part of a broader messaging campaign.

On Friday, Ben Rhodes, Obama’s foreign policy guru who is notorious for bragging about his media manipulation strategies, tweeted: “The filibuster is a tool of structural racism. Get rid of it. It’s time to stop playing by rules that work for the wrong people.”