Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: The filibuster, Senate, & Boris Johnson
In the early going, Oliver of course had a field day talking about Donald Trump and his recent philosophy when it comes to Hurricane Dorian coverage about him — to be specific, we’re talking about Sharpie-gate, which got a lot of headlines over a map that he had drawn on. Oliver then shared an incredible story about how Trump annotated and criticized one of his writers over an article written in Vanity Fair … with a Sharpie, no less.
From there, though, the host went into a discussion of the latest from Boris Johnson and the UK. We knew that there would be some great material here, including a member of Parliament defecting in the middle of one of Johnson’s speeches. (Here’s a reminder that Last Week Tonight cannot show comedic footage of Parliament in the UK — instead, there will be clips from an Irish sex education video instead.) The segment ended with a discussion of Boris’ brother Jo Johnson making a decision to walk away from Parliament.
Let’s just say that we’re going to see so much more of Oliver talking about Johnson over the next few weeks.
About the filibuster
The Senate and this particular tactic ended up being the subject of Oliver’s main segment this time around. The filibuster is something that Senators often used in order to defer bills and keep them from coming to a vote — and in general, there isn’t much that actually gets done in the Senate. Is this one of the biggest reasons why?
Within his main segment tonight, Oliver talked about how filibusters have gone from being something that is used once in a while to something that keeps actual stuff from happening — it’s even a bragging point for many within their campaigns!
So is there an easy solution to this problem? Probably not, but it would benefit everyone to have Senators in power who think about problem-solving more so through other means. (Ironically, Oliver pointed out that Donald Trump is actually in favor of eliminating the filibuster — one of the few things they agree on.)
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