John Lewis funeral: Barack Obama calls for voting reform and filibuster’s end in rousing eulogy for civil rights hero

Barack Obama said he supported ending the Senate’s filibuster rule if that’s what it takes to pass voting rights legislation, as he delivered a powerful eulogy for the late Congressman John Lewis.

In a rousing speech in Atlanta on Thursday, Mr Obama, the first black president in US history, advocated for several reforms to make it easier for Americans to vote, including:

“If all of this takes eliminating the filibuster, another Jim Crow relic, in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do,” Mr Obama said.

The 44th president paid tribute to Mr Lewis's contribution to the civil rights battles of the 1960s, particularly the march over the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, during which Mr Lewis was badly beaten.

But Mr Obama said that although times had changed over the intervening 60 years and notorious politicians of the period were no longer in power, the challenges facing African Americans were just as real. He said: "Bull Connor may be gone, but today we witness with our own eyes, police officers kneeling on the necks of black Americans.

"George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators. We may no longer have to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar in order to cast a ballot, but even as we sit here there are those in power who are doing their darndest to discourage people from voting."

The Senate filibuster is a longtime chamber rule that effectively requires 60 senators to pass any legislation instead of the simple majority outlined in the Constitution.

The rule has enjoyed bipartisan support for decades as a check on majority mob rule in the Senate, which American historians and lawmakers are fond of heralding as ”the world’s greatest deliberative body”.

But Democrats have increasingly signalled their openness to ditching the rule if they regain a Senate majority after the 2020 election and if Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden beats Donald Trump.

Even Mr Biden has indicated he may support doing away with the 60-vote threshold.

“It’s going to depend on how obstreperous [Senate Republicans] become” if they become the minority party, Mr Biden said earlier this month, the New York Times reported.

Mr Biden, who spent 35 years in the Senate representing Delaware before becoming vice president in 2009, has historically supported the filibuster as a way to gather bipartisan consensus on legislation and force cooperation between the two parties. He expressed optimism that he and Senate Republicans could still negotiate legislation in good faith without doing away with the filibuster.

“But I think you’re going to just have to take a look at it,” he said.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has vowed never to axe the filibuster rule so long as he is in power.

“On legislation ... the Senate’s treasured tradition is not efficiency but deliberation,” the Kentucky Republican wrote in an op-ed for the Times last summer.

“One of the body’s central purposes is making new laws earn broader support than what is required for a bare majority in the House,” Mr McConnell wrote, arguing that while the legislative filibuster does not appear in the Constitution’s text, it is “central to the order the Constitution sets forth” and is in line with what America’s founding fathers would have wanted.

Mr Obama has complained about the filibuster before, but had never called for its outright abandonment. The former president’s moving speech about Mr Lewis was a salute to his role as a leading black voice for civil and voting rights over the last 60 years.

Mr Lewis was one of 13 original “Freedom Riders” who rode buses in integrated pairings through the US South in the 1960s, when many had laws prohibiting blacks and whites from sitting next to each other.

He attended lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee, during the student movement there, and he was one of the main organisers of the 1963 March on Washington, where Dr Martin Luther King Jr delivered his famed “I Have a Dream” speech.

“America was built by John Lewises. He as much as anyone in our history brought this country a little bit closer to our highest ideals,” Mr Obama said on Thursday.

“And some day when we do finish that long journey towards freedom, when we do form a more perfect union, whether it’s years from now or decades or even if it takes another two centuries, John Lewis will be a founding father of that fuller, fairer, better America.”

Mr Obama was one of three former presidents to speak at Mr Lewis's funeral, along with George W Bush and Bill Clinton. Jimmy Carter, the only other surviving former US president, is 95 years old and no longer travels but sent a tribute to the civil rights hero.

Others attending the service included some of those tipped as possible vice-presidential picks for Mr Biden, including California senator Kamala Harris, voting rights activist Stacey Abrams and the mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms.