State Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh ground Nebraska’s legislative body to a halt for three weeks, stonewalling every bill regardless of whether she personally opposed it. In eight-hour stretches, she fulfilled the promise she made to her colleagues last month: to “make it painful” for the statehouse to target trans youth—even if it meant sleeping on the hardwood floor of her office between committee hearings.
Her use of the filibuster to keep a bill from being quietly slipped through the legislature echoes another one-woman statehouse stand from 10 years ago. Both Wendy Davis and Cavanaugh took advantage of tools available to them as the minority party in their statehouses—and used it to amplify dry procedural politics into a powerful rallying cry.