Who is Wendy Davis?

washingtonpost.com

14 points·Libertatea··4 comments

I'm not sure why this topic is relevant on HN. 7 points in 15 minutes. For some reason, it's really important to a bunch of people here. Is there more than what's in the article?

The way this has played out through social media has been amazing. The biggest thing I can think of is that someone falsified documents to make it look like the vote was taken before the 12:00 AM deadline, when it in fact took place several minutes after the deadline. Enough people on the Internet had the foresight to take screenshots and print hard copies of the original record, so that when the falsified document started circulating they could call the politicians on their fraudulence. I assume this information made its way up to the Democrats arguing against the bill.

https://twitter.com/becca_aa/status/349772548269027328/photo...

This is really great, Wendy's a total hero, it's inspiring to see democracy producing some good results right now. But surely filibusters generally are a really terrible system. Had it been the other way round and another politician had tried to filibuster a bill to protect womens rights, that would have been terrible.

I'm not from the US so I'm not really sure about what the situation is with filibusters but it seems to me to be a loophole that needs fixing, or a symptom of some underlying system which needs fixing. Is anyone pushing for reform right now? It's great that this time it was used to a positive end but couldn't it just as easily be abused to cut in the other direction?

the point is to prevent a tyranny of the majority. I personally wouldn't want to do away with it.

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