28 August—Six years before Martin Luther King Jr. told the world about his dream, on this day in 1957 South Carolina racist U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond, a Democrat at the time who conveniently converted to the Republican communion in 1964 and insisted he wasn’t a racist, launched into his infamous whole-day-long blabbering filibuster against President Dwight Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Act, the first federal legislation on civil rights since Reconstruction.

After all the jockeying and compromises necessary to get the legislation passed, the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which focused on voting rights and bureaucracy, was realistically a pretty small step for mankind. But it was a step in the right direction and paved the way for President Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin, ended racial separation in public places, and made job discrimination illegal. And then some.

Thurmond, who had in preparation of his oratorical surprise (yes, evidently he hadn’t told even his racist colleagues) taken steam baths to dehydrate himself so as to preclude piss breaks, had to quit his filibuster 18 minutes into the second day because he had run out of fetid gas.

Back in the day, by the way, since the practice’s formal codification in 1917, senators were required to actually hold the floor to filibuster, which meant no excuses or breaks at all. And it took a two-thirds vote of those senators present to invoke cloture. In 1959, the two-thirds requirement was ever so briefly extended to the entire Senate membership. Now, of course, since 1975, cloture for most legislation requires only three-fifths—but of the entire Senate membership, i.e., the notorious 60 votes.

Democrats and Republicans alike—but mostly Democrats—are responsible for fiddling and corrupting the cloture rule, which consequently fiddles and corrupts filibuster itself. And of course Donald Trump wants to further corrupt filibuster (as he’s corrupted everything else) for his own benefit. But the Republican Senate leadership doesn’t appear to be caving for the orange ayatollah. Yet.

Back to Strom Thurmond’s monumental racist filibuster, then, it set a record which hasn’t been broken. And the 1957 Civil Rights Act passed the Senate 72 to 18, all the 18 being racist southern Democrats, only two hours after Thurmond shut his mouth.

And lest you think that New Jersey Senator Cory Booker’s 25-hour performance last year broke Thurmond’s reprehensible record, Booker’s well-founded critique of the Trump administration was a protest speech rather than a legislative filibuster. Booker evidently didn’t resort to steam baths to dehydrate himself.

So what about Depends? Don’t ask . . .