to you today about my book,strom thurman'smer, and i want to begin by telling you a story, my strom thurman story. when you go and do research in south carolina and you go into archives and people ask you what you're writing about and you tell themstrom thurmond, they say, let me tell you my story. you can't throw a stone in south carolina without hitting somebody with a great story about strom thurmond. so my story about strom thurmond bulletins in late july, 1992, and i'm on a flight from washington, dc to charlotte, north carolina. and i'd been an intern that summer up on capitol hill. and one of my regrets of the summer was that i had never seen strom thurmond. all my fellow interns said, you got to see strom thurmond. he is such an unusual appearance about him. and i didn't know what they meant really about that. but i had my suspicions. so i'm on the flight, and i look ahead in front of me and see a man who has these orange colored hair, practically. so brightly colored, and first generation hair plugs, and shows you how slow i am. i think to myself, that must be what strom thurmond's

i mean the record is held by strom thurman whom hated the civil rights bill so much, mr.that he stood tup on the floor of the senate for 24 hours and 18 minutes before he had to pee and filibuster ended and they voted. but that was the filibuster. now, it's come into something that happens all the time, that is routine that one senate can do to block a measure from coming up a vote. first, they have a vote of whether or not they are going to proceed to a vote. you can filibuster that. you can filibuster the main event, and you don't have to do a filibuster. all you have to say is: i am filibustering this and sit in your office and watch t.v. and nothing happens. it is outrageous. it is undemocratic. it's the tierney of the minority. we talked about this for so long with senators who were determined that not just this term, but last term term before, but this term for sure with democrats having 55 votes, there is no reason why they couldn't fix it. and if i canning it meant either getting rid of the filibuster or making people actually filibuster or roll in cots so the oth