April 14th 2005 • Printer version

 I know I'm being disrespectful to this honorable body, I know that, says James Stewart in the famous 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Smithís disrespectful behavior was conducting a one-senator filibuster to stop crooked land interests from plundering the public trough.

Chapter member Alexander Frix í06 initiated the event, which he hopes will be remembered as "The Filibuster to Save the Filibuster." The event eventually involved more than a dozen student and faculty speakers to produce a non-stop flood of oratory between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. What better place to filibuster than in the commons named after Oregon's famous gadfly, who spoke on his feet for over 22 hours to protect a minority viewpoint? said Frix.

Frix also provided the imitation of Stewart as he read from the script of Mr. Smith. The Commons also heard slightly less pitch-perfect imitations of Richard Nixon (in his famous Checkers Speech) and former Missouri Senator G.G. Vest, the author of the famed Eulogy of the Dog.

But political speechifying was not the only content of the filibuster. Lauren Sommers í06 read from William Goldmanís The Princess Bride; Cindy Mitchell í06 read On the Rainy River by Tim OíBrien; Aaron Grieser í07 read from Shel Silversteinís Where the Sidewalk Ends; visiting professor Svitlana Kravchenko delivered a brief address in her native Russian; and chapter faculty adviser Garrett Epps read a long selection from The Queen of Sheba, a romantic fantasy by J.C. Mardrus.  

The next day, April 12, the UO chapter of ACS sponsored a lunchtime talk by Jeff Berman, managing director of The Berman Group in Los Angeles and former chief counsel to United States Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY). Berman, whose talk was entitled "The Constitutionality of the Filibuster," reviewed the history of free debate in the Senate from 1789 until the present, and discussed the arguments the current Republican Senate majority is using in an attempt to impose a new rule barring filibusters of judicial nominees. He noted that the nominees against whom Democrats have used the manuever are "the worst of the worst of the worst" of Bush's right-wing nominees. "These are scary folks," he said.

Law professor Garrett Epps  provided this summary of a recent event held by ACS' University of Oregon chapter for the American Constitution Society blog. Epps is the chapterís faculty advisor.