I logged on to Twitter on Wednesday morning and the tweets that greeted me had me a little puzzled. While trying to understand what uproar was about, I logged on to Tumblr where the posts on my dashboard had me equally confused. I finally gave up trying to infer what was going from the series of posts on both Tumblr and Twitter, and ran a Google search of two words that were common in most of the posts; filibuster, and Wendy Davis.
Prior to Thursday I had no idea what filibuster was but I remedied that by reading about it on Wikipedia, and apparently it's an interesting concept. A filibuster is (basically) an attempt to forestall a piece of legislature from being passed into law, now this is usually done by presenting a long speech that must be relevant to the legislature in question.
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| Senator Davis opted for comfy sneakers |
Enter our shero, Wendy Davis.
While Nigeria slept Tuesday night/early Wednesday morning, Wendy Davis took on the rather heavy burden of attempting to filibuster a legislature that if passed would place a ban on abortions, and close 37 out of 42 clinics in Texas.
The task? Wendy Davis had to speak for thirteen straight hours, without having to sit, go to the bathroom or even lean on her table! Wendy Davis, who is 50 years old, and the mother of two kids did just that. She started speaking at 11:00 a.m till about 10:00 p.m (eleven hours y'all) when Republican senators were said to have ruled her out of order and brought her filibustering to an end.
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| Senator Davis |
Read more about this: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/abortion-rights-under-fire-why-wendy-davis-filibuster-matters-20130626
and
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2348675/Texas-Senate-filibuster-Sen-Wendy-Davis-abortion-filibuster-broken-11-hours.html
