I am responding to the June 9 letter to the editor captioned, “The filibuster is racist and needs to go,” (Lake Orion Review, June 9, 2021, page 6)

Saying that the filibuster is “racist” and a “Jim Crow Relic” is absurd. The filibuster goes all the way back to Roman times and was not created during Reconstruction. The filibuster can be used to tie up any policy initiative, not just ones involving race.

It can be used by Republicans and Democrats.

The filibuster is an important tool in Congress that helps protect us from mob rule.

We are NOT a true democracy in America. Our Constitution created a Republic with the express purpose to protect minority opinions. Our Founding Fathers knew true democracy leads to mob rule, where 50.1 percent of the vote gets absolute power. The Electoral College was created for the same reason, to protect voters who are in the minority.

We are a nation predicated on the rules laid out in the Constitution. The main themes of the Constitution are that government should be local, the federal government should be weak, new laws should be hard to create and freedom is of the utmost importance. The founding fathers thought laws should be hard to pass, because the more laws a nation has, the less freedom its people have.

The filibuster perfectly fits the main themes discussed above.

The truth is, if Southern Democrats had not ignored the 13th (making slavery illegal), 14th (equal protection under the law), and 15th (voting rights for blacks) Amendments, the 1964 Act would not have been necessary. The Southern Democrats attempt to block the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by filibustering for 75 hours, including a 14-hour address by Democrat Senator Robert Byrd, would never have happened.

Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema are protecting the filibuster today because they want to stop our radical government from making states out of Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., and to stop Congress from enacting H.R. 1, the voting bill that would violate the Constitution’s rule that gives explicit power to make voting laws in the state legislatures.

Our leftist Congress wants to permanently enact mail-in voting, and they want to make ballot harvesting legal, all things that make our elections less secure.

These initiatives are created only to bolster Democrat power, not to make elections better.

Anthony Catalina

Orion Twp.