Tonight, Texas State Senator Wendy Davis began a 13 hour filibuster to prevent the Texas legislature from passing one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the country. She couldn't eat, she couldn't take a break to go use the bathroom, she couldn't sit down, she couldn't even lean against the podium. Senator Davis has to keep speaking about this topic the whole time. They tried everything they could to stop her, including finally declaring her off topic because she was talking about sonograms and not abortion. The thing is, she still was talking about abortion, because the law would require women to have sonograms before having an abortion.
At one point, over 200k people were watching the livestream of this filibuster. That is how many people were interested in this, how many people wanted to watch this Senator take a stand for what she believed in. Just pass midnight, everything felt good. Everyone believed that it was over and that she'd done what she set out to do. For a moment, I felt proud to be an American, proud to witness democracy working.
And then . . . they start voting anyway. It was illegal to do the vote at that point. It shouldn't be able to stand up in court. They tried to make all kinds of bullshit excuses about why it was just perfectly FINE to cast the vote past midnight, but everyone knows it wasn't. One Senator tweeted that the vote passed at 11:59, but clearly he didn't realize that people were watching and recording what happened. Certainly they don't realize that many, many people know that they just committed fraud.
No matter how this turns out, one thing is certain, the mainstream media outlets, all of them, have rendered themselves unimportant. None of them covered this filibuster. None of them were a part of this historic point in American history. The internet watched this event, Tweeted about it, liveblogged it, talked about it on Facebook, and kept each other informed. Even if this wasn't a gamechanger in the abortion debate, it was a gamechanger in terms of how we get our news.
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