What the Filibuster Is Blocking

July 2, 2021

By Matt Hughes

The popular policies stalled for decades.

The Roosevelt Rundown features our top stories of the week.

An Obstacle to Progress

Voting rights. LGBTQ+ protections. Gender equity.

The filibuster is currently preventing the passage of essential, broadly popular reforms—and senators’ increasing usage has accelerated a decades-long trend of thwarted legislative progress.

That isn’t constitutional design. It’s exploitation of an accident, as Roosevelt’s Emily DiVito explains.

“At the critical moment we’re in—having made significant progress combatting COVID-19 and on the brink of an economic boom—we can’t let an accidental loophole dictate what is politically possible. The filibuster has frequently presaged the defeat of progressive civil rights, worker power, and economic reforms. That won’t change until we change it.”

Read “Then and Now: The Filibuster Obstructs Policies for the People.”

The Legacy of George Floyd

“The immoral devaluation of Black lives has been ingrained in America’s political economy and is long overdue for a reckoning,” Roosevelt Fellow Darrick Hamilton said this week at a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Diversity and Inclusion.

“Government has a fiduciary responsibility to facilitate economic inclusion, civic engagement, and social equity for all its people.”

Read on for Hamilton’s full testimony at the hearing—“The Legacy of George Floyd: An Examination of Financial Services Industry Commitments to Economic and Racial Justice.”

New Fiduciary Rules

“It is time to rewrite the rules of asset manager fiduciary duty—that is, the responsibilities that those who manage money have to those whose money it is—to more accurately reflect the interests that households have in a sustainable economy and livable planet,” Roosevelt Fellow Lenore Palladino and Rick Alexander—founder of The Shareholder Commons—write in a new Roosevelt issue brief.

Read their recommendations for federal reform.