The day for assessing that experience is at hand. Token gains may well halt our progress, rather than further it. The time has come when the government must commit its immense resources squarely on the side of the quest for freedom. This is not a struggle in which government is a mere mediator. Its laws are being violated.
In sections like the previous one, it is evident that U.S. politics remains very similar to the politics King had to confront to win civil rights victories. King recognized that violations of the law and failure to correct perceived mistakes could tell Americans more than judging how a presidential administration handled forces aligned against change. In the aftermath of the struggle for health reform legislation, King's rubric for judgment should compel progressives to ask what the Administration intends to do to enforce laws and regulate insurance. It also should ask if it has learned from its failure to communicate an agenda for health reform, because that is what gave great power to Tea Party forces that branded the legislation "Obamacare," that is what gave insurance companies great power to convince Americans Obama wanted to pass "a government takeover of healthcare," even though Americans were going to be forced to buy a defective product from private insurance companies under penalty of law because of the individual mandate.
Progressives very much allowed forces of the status quo to stunt the level of change pushed through Congress. A conglomeration of people organizing under the Tea Party moniker created a political culture from the "bottom" up (even if it had secret financers like Dick Armey or the Koch Brothers or Karl Rove raising money to help it take action). Media accepted this as something that would severely limit the agenda of President Obama and progressives lowered their expectations. Unlike King, who did not allow the Ku Klux Klan or those outright sympathetic to force compromise, progressives gave up and accepted a limited goal.
In "Hammer of Civil Rights," written in 1964, there is further indication that the Senate posed a threat to progressive legislation like it still does today. In the essay, he wrote of the filibuster, "As had been foreseen, the bill survived intact in the House. It has now moved to the Senate, where a legislative confrontation reminiscent of Birmingham impends. Bull Connor became a weight too heavy for the conscience of Birmingham to bear. There are men in the Senate who now plan to perpetuate the injustices Bull Connor so ignobly defended. His weapons were the high-pressure hose, the club and the snarling dog; theirs is the filibuster. If America is as revolted by them as it was by Bull Connor, we shall emerge with a victory."
The filibuster has consistently popped up as an enemy to a progressive agenda in America. If progressives can learn one thing from King's attitude toward the filibuster, it is that progressives should frame moves to filibuster (or place "secret holds" on legislation) as part of an agenda of injustice. The filibuster should be framed as a weapon that can bring suffering. In the same way an insurance company can deny coverage, a predatory lender can manipulate interest rates, a bank can throw families out of their homes with no proof to support foreclosure, the filibuster can bring pain and anguish.
King contended, "It is not too much to ask 101 years after the Emancipation, that Senators who must meet the challenge of filibuster do so in the spirit of heroes of Birmingham. They must avoid temptation to compromise the bill as a means of ending the filibuster. They can use the Birmingham method by keeping the Senate in continuous session, by matching the ability of the segregationists to talk with their capacity to outlast them. Nonviolent action to resist can be practiced in the Senate as well as in the streets."
He hoped that those in favor of radical change would wear down "Southern obstructionists" and force them to a point where they were morally and physically exhausted. He then supposed that cloture could be employed to end the "misery" they were experiencing. He believed that the movement needed to wait out obstructionism, not bend to it. He did not suggest that people take cues from President Kennedy and adjust their goals or objectives when faced with opposition in the Senate. On the contrary, he welcomed opposition as an opportunity to exhaust defenders of the status quo.
Returning to his essay, "A Bold Design for a New South," King wrote:
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