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William F. Buckley famously described the conservative movement as the one that “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”

While America waited for the Senate to decide that civil rights’ time had come, the institution applied a different standard to every other issue. During this period, the U.S. government passed the laws it needed to fight and win two world wars, build a social safety net, come back stronger from a Great Depression, bust trusts, create an interstate

the eighty-seven-year wait enforced by the filibuster—a delay that continued long after majorities in Congress and the public were ready for action—had exacted a toll of incalculable human suffering and inflamed the “violent passions” that Madison had intended the Senate to cool.

This was telling. If Russell’s concern had truly been for the unlimited debate he and his fellow southerners claimed to defend, he should have celebrated Vandenberg’s ruling, since it eliminated the only restriction on debate that the Senate had put on the books in more than a hundred years. This was supposedly what Russell wanted: a return to the