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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. We begin today with some very interesting legislative developments out of Nebraska.

Senator Cavanaugh: Court Modernization project. Page 179, The Martian.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Wait, wait, stick with me. I promise you it's not as boring as it might initially sound. That's Nebraska State Senator, Machaela Cavanaugh. She's in the middle of a filibuster.

Senator Cavanaugh: $1 million in FY 25. I think I started to read this already. Oh, I did? Okay, so where did I leave off? The governor's recommendation for this issue was to amend section 48-145.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, a filibuster is a procedural tactic whereby a senator can take the floor and never give it up. Senator Cavanaugh has kept up her filibuster for 11 weeks. In the Nebraska legislature, a senator can speak for as long as five minutes at a time, up to three times for every motion or amendment introduced. They can also lend their own time to others. Once a new motion or amendment is introduced, they again, start it all over again.

Senator Cavanaugh: I received a couple of emails about concrete. Thank you for those. Please don't give me concrete recipes the way people have been giving me salad recipes.

Melissa Harris-Perry: And again,

Senator Cavanaugh: There's furniture in this building that just gets passed around from office to office over the years. I got Big Blue from Senator Blood. Big Blue is a reclining chair.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Again.

Senator Cavanaugh: Let's see here.

Senate President: One minute.

Senator Cavanaugh: Thank you, Mr. President. The Real Estate Commission, page 182 of the Martian.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Senator Cavanaugh has been trying to stop the passage of legislative Bill 574. The original bill would prevent people under the age of 18 from obtaining gender-affirming healthcare, including hormone therapy and puberty blockers. When it moved out of committee in February, Senator Cavanaugh made this promise.

Senator Cavanaugh: If this legislature collectively decides that legislating hate against children is our priority, then I am going to make it painful, painful for everyone, because if you want to inflict pain upon our children, I am going to inflict pain upon this body.

Melissa Harris-Perry: On Monday afternoon, the filibuster took on new urgency. Conservative Nebraska lawmakers introduced an amendment to the bill to try to garner more support. It narrowed the ban on gender-affirming healthcare to a ban exclusively on surgeries, but it also added a ban on abortions after 12 weeks and included criminal penalties. It was before this development on Monday when Senator Cavanaugh joined us between legislative sessions.

Senator Cavanaugh: Nebraska, like many states across the country, saw the introduction of anti-LGBTQ and specifically anti-trans legislation at the start of our 2023 session. I am using the tools available to me, which is taking time. I'm in the minority party here in Nebraska. The only tool I really have to be an obstructionist is time, so I'm taking time to try and force my colleagues to decide who it is we want to be as a state and what is it that we really want to be legislating. I don't believe that we want to be legislating hate. I think that we want to be legislating policy that's good for all Nebraskans. This Bill LB 574 that's anti-gender affirming care for trans-kids, is not good for any Nebraskans.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Why does it matter so much to you?

Senator Cavanaugh: Well, these are kids. I think it's my job as an adult, and it's certainly my job as an elected official to do everything in my power to protect children. This is a legislation that's targeting a minority, vulnerable group of children. It is absolutely my job to do everything that I possibly can to stand in the way of that. We should not be harming children with our policy. I don't view it as really a choice or an option. It's my job.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You're not just filibustering this bill. You are obstructing the movement of legislation. Can you say more about this strategy?

Senator Cavanaugh: I'm losing a lot of things. I haven't had a single piece of legislation move out of any committee this year, and I don't think that I ever will. I accepted that early on. I'm also losing legislation that I support of my colleagues. A lot of things are not happening. At the end of the day, I think that there's a lot of really great things that we could pass into law, but not at the expense of legislating hate against children.

Nothing to me is so important to pass that we shouldn't stand in the way of this type of legislation. That's why I'm doing it. It's a hard thing to do, and it's a hard thing to really explain to people. I don't see it as a choice. I see it as an essential duty, and I really don't believe that the people that I work with want to legislate hate against children. I think that everyone in every legislature across the country has gotten swept up in this national rhetoric that is anti-LGBTQ, and specifically anti-trans, and so I'm trying to shake people awake and taking time to do it.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Who's got your back?

Senator Cavanaugh: My brother. I serve with my brother, which is an amazing gift on a lot of levels, but my brother, John Cavanaugh, and I serve together. We're the first siblings to serve together in the Nebraska legislature. Being able to serve with my brother, John, has been amazing, and we carpal together, and our spouses are parenting our children together. We have seven children between us. He has my back in a way. I don't think either of us ever expected that he was going to need to, but he does.

Some of my other colleagues. I serve with the first bisexual woman elected to the legislature, Megan Hunt, who also has a transgendered son. She's an amazing friend and ally in all of this. I serve with John Frederickson, who's the first gay man elected to the legislature. He has continually shown up for me. My colleagues from the Health and Human Services Committee, Jen Day and Lynn Walls, have worked alongside me and trying to keep this out of coming out of the committee, to begin with. There's several others that have been working with me and I'm very grateful. I'm not doing it alone. Sometimes it looks like it, and sometimes it does feel like it, but I'm not alone.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Quick pause, everybody. We'll be back with Nebraska State Senator Machaela Cavanaugh right after this. We're back, and still with us is Machaela Cavanaugh, state Senator from Nebraska, who's in the 11th week of a filibuster to prevent passage of a bill that denies gender affirming medical care to minors. I want to talk about the idea of a filibuster, because at the federal level, it's gotten a lot of critiques, obviously, from progressives, from social justice-oriented folks, who, in looking at the history of the filibuster, have seen it used mostly for regressive ends. Were you at all nervous about using this particular tool?

Senator Cavanaugh: Well, in Nebraska, the filibuster is different. First of all, we're a unicameral, so we're different on a lot of levels, to begin with. The filibuster has always been a tool of the minority in Nebraska. The minority in Nebraska is not a party minority. The minority in the Nebraska unicameral is different based on what bill it is. Sometimes it's an urban minority, sometimes it's a rural minority, sometimes it's a political party minority.

Because we're unicameral, and we don't organize by political party caucuses, and we don't have political party leadership, that's not really how it works here, so it's functioned very differently. Of course, what I'm doing this year turns that all on its head, but generally speaking, the filibuster has been a tool for the minority to try and leverage time and votes to get compromised. It's worked pretty well in Nebraska.

We've been able to maintain being a moderate conservative state, I think in large part because of the tool of the filibuster. I have been using it, forcing every bill on every round of debate to go to cloture. Meaning that every single bill must have 33 votes, and every bill has had 33 votes for the most part. It's really just about taking time and elongating debate so that fewer things happen so that people feel the pressure to come to the table.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is not a bill, though, that you believe can or should be. There shouldn't be compromise on this question, right?

Senator Cavanaugh: No, not in my mind. There shouldn't be. Many people think that there should be. I don't think that you compromise on human rights or civil rights or parental rights, and this bill takes away all of those, and I don't know how you can possibly compromise on that. Saying that there is a possibility to compromise on human rights and civil rights, to me, is taking numerous steps backwards in progress that we've made in society.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Have you heard from your constituents about it?

Senator Cavanaugh: Oh, yes. [laughs] Yes, I have heard from my constituents and everyone's constituents from across the state and across- the country, and even internationally. It has been overwhelmingly in support of what I am doing, and overwhelmingly in opposition to this type of legislation, myself, along with all of the constituents. Most of us have been doing a learning game. I didn't know what gender-affirming care was until this bill was introduced, and I have had to learn a lot about it. As people learn about it, they start to say, "Hey, wait a minute.

We're telling parents how to parent, basically. We're telling parents what medical care they can get for their kid. That's the path we're on. If the government can tell you how to parent medically for this issue, we're opening up the door to a lot of other parental right issues in addition to the civil and human rights issues here.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It seems like you've got a lot of faith in your fellow lawmakers, that you believe that time might lead to knowledge, to conversations, to deliberative democracy that could change how this goes. Am I reading that right?

Machaela Cavanaugh: Yes. I love that. Yes, I want there to be deliberative democracy. I want that for my state and I want that for every state and for the country. It's what we should have. We should be able to have honest conversations and thoughtful conversations that can change the direction of policy. That's the whole point of this democracy. I'm trying to do that every single day.

Some of it's happening on the microphone and a lot of it is happening off the microphone, having private conversations with my colleagues that are unsure about how they feel about this. At the end of this, hopefully, we see deliberative democracy winning out and people standing up for what they believe to be the right thing to do. That's really what I'm asking is for people to do the right thing.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Obviously, filibustering requires just talking. How do you decide what to talk about?

Machaela Cavanaugh: Every day is different. I attempt to the best of my ability to stay on topic with the bill at hand, but sometimes, you run out of things to say, especially if a bill is one page long and you're going to talk for eight hours. That's when everyone gets inside look into how my brain works in free association.

I just started talking about whatever strikes my fancy, but I do have an ongoing conversation with myself about the Oxford comma. Last week I dug into the Chicago-style manuals views on the Oxford comma. I previously had discussed the APA styles views on the Oxford comma, I've even tied striking pieces of legislation into the conversation of how it's the Oxford comma parts of the statute. I amuse myself with grammar, I guess.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Listen, as a grammar nerd, may I just suggest when you're back to filibustering, I also have many feelings about the split infinitive. Despite being a Trekkie, there's just no doubt that it should not be to boldly go, it should be to go boldly where no one has go before. [laughter]

Machaela Cavanaugh: I may talk about the split infinitive this afternoon now that you've put it in my mind.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Nebraska State Senator Machaela Cavanaugh, thank you so much for joining us on The Takeaway.

Machaela Cavanaugh: Thank you for having me. I really do appreciate it.

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