Obama wants the filibuster gone and speech ruled: ‘What’s going to change isn’t the change you want’

Former president Barack Obama is talking about more than Democrats winning the upcoming midterm elections — he's talking about changing how government and public discussions work.

And BlazeTV host Pat Gray of “Pat Gray Unleashed” is alarmed.

At the annual Salem State University Speaker Series showcase last week, Obama explained to students that “we have to redesign how the federal government, at least, works so that it can actually get stuff done.”

“And I’ll give you one example that plagued me during my presidency, and even during my presidency, I was convinced we needed to get rid of it,” he continued.

“The practice of the filibuster, which is not in the Constitution. It is a practice that was adopted almost by accident,” he added.

“How many times have we said this?” Gray interjects. “The second they’re in office, they’re going to do this. They’re going to get rid of the filibuster, something that John Thune refused to even consider. Would not do it. Wouldn’t even use the filibuster to his advantage.”

Obama went on to explain that “Dixie-crats,” or Southern Democrats, exploited this to “prevent civil rights legislation.”

“Southern Democrats were some of the worst practitioners of the filibuster, but it was rarely used,” he said.

“By the time I got to office, Mitch McConnell, who was the Senate leader on the Republican side when the Republicans took control of the Senate in 2010, essentially just rewrote the Constitution so that you had to have a supermajority to get anything through the Senate,” he explained.

“And what happens there is people start getting very cynical if they elect somebody who seems idealistic and has a great plan and then suddenly it just hits a wall, and that happens again and again and again,” he continued.

“After a certain point, people feel like, well, nobody’s listening to me,” he added.

“What’s going to change isn’t the change you want,” Jeff Fisher comments.

“Freedom of speech: You’re about to wave goodbye to it if the Democrats take office,” executive producer Keith Malinak says, before playing another clip of Obama explaining that “the reality of somebody who’s reading the New York Times is entirely foreign to somebody who’s watching Fox News.”

“We’re going to have to find ways to bridge that. And we’re going to have to create new town squares essentially where everybody is having a common dialogue with certain rules, and that becomes even more important as technology accelerates,” he went on.

“You’re about to get a fairness doctrine for social media,” Malinak comments.

“You’re talking about burning down the country,” Gray adds.

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