You think I'm late?

You all think I'm late?

Well, I'm not late.

And I'm going to stay right here and fight for this lost cause.

Even if this wound gets filled with lies like these.

And the tailors and all their armies come marching into this place.

Somebody will listen to me.

Somebody.

Somebody.

No!

That's the famous scene from Mr. Smith goes to Washington.

The classic 1939 film in which Jimmy Stewart plays a senator who stands up to fraud and corruption

by deploying one of the archaic rules of the chamber, the filibuster.

In the movie version, Stewart, as the young naive senator Jefferson Smith,

speaks for hours on end, calling out the shady actions of his colleagues until he drops from exhaustion.

In fact, as Adam Jettelson writes in his new book Kill Switch,

the actual filibuster has almost never been used for such heroic purposes.

And these days nobody drops from exhaustion.

Instead, it's been a vehicle used by diehard conservatives to block civil rights and other progressive legislation.

And under current rules can be triggered with a simple email registering an objection.

Nobody actually has to say anything.

Is it time to kill the filibuster once and for all?

...