Trump wants Republicans to kill the filibuster. Great!
In the long run, it would be good for Democrats and democracy.
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With the government shutdown entering its second month, President Trump has found his solution: Senate Republicans should eliminate the filibuster, which they can do with a simple majority vote.
Do that, and Democrats will no longer stand in their way. They can end the shutdown tomorrow and without giving up anything. Then they can get to passing the rest of the GOP’s legislative agenda.
As much as he might like the idea, it’s hard to know how committed Trump is to it. So far, he hasn’t put serious pressure on Senate Republicans to do his bidding on the filibuster (though he reportedly might start squeezing them soon). But Democrats should hope he does, and that he gets GOP senators to fall in line.
That’s because even though filibuster elimination would be bad in the short term — that is, at least through the midterm elections, at which point Democrats may take control of one or both houses of Congress — in the long run it would still be good for both progressive policy priorities and the responsiveness of our democracy.
Short term pain, long term gain
We haven’t had the filibuster debate in a while, but it usually comes up when Democrats are in control and find themselves thwarted by Republicans.
The filibuster allows the minority party to kill almost any bill in the Senate. No matter how popular it might be, without 60 votes for passage, even the most worthy legislation will die. Joe Biden was only the latest Democrat to find his agenda ground to a halt despite having majority support in both houses for much of what he wanted to pass.
Over time the filibuster has been altered and changed. It can no longer be deployed against judicial and executive branch nominations, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style “talking filibusters” are no longer used to stop legislation (though every now and then a senator conducts a speaking marathon just to draw attention to an issue).
The basic logic of maintaining the filibuster is this: We’d rather get none of what we want, so long as we can stop the other party from getting anything it wants. There are some in both parties who feel this way.
The problem from the perspective of Democrats is that they are the party that wants an activist government. To put it another way, they simply want to do more things than Republicans do, so a status quo of near-total gridlock extending indefinitely hurts them more than it hurts the GOP, for whom a government unable to solve the country’s problems is a feature, not a bug.
In fact, Republicans like the filibuster even when they themselves are in control. That’s because it enables them to avoid passing legislation that the party officially favors but that smart Republicans know would be disastrous for them politically. They could outlaw abortion nationwide, or repeal the Affordable Care Act and privatize Medicare. But their leaders know that the result would be electoral catastrophe, so they can avoid pushing those policies and blame the filibuster.
They can’t admit that in public, so they warn that the filibuster must be maintained to thwart the Democrats’ dastardly plans, as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson did on Monday when he threatened us all with a great time.
This is a one-sided version of the be careful what you wish for argument in the filibuster’s favor, that while the party that eliminates it will benefit in the short term, it will rue the day when the other party gains a Senate majority and decides to use it. A similar argument has it that we don’t want to have wild policy swings with each change in power, see-sawing the country from liberalism to conservatism every few years.
But there’s another word for that: democracy. The whole reason to have a legislature that passes laws is so the public can elect representatives who then carry out its will. If the legislature never legislates apart from a once-yearly reconciliation bill that can pass with a simple majority and the occasional uncontroversial law, there isn’t much in the way of popular representation.
Will that sometimes produce extreme policies the public doesn’t really want? Probably. But there is a constraint on the majority’s ability to go hog-wild: public opinion, both in the present and the next time an election comes around. That’s what was operating in 2017 when Republicans tried to use reconciliation to repeal the Affordable Care Act, just as they had been promising since it passed seven years before.
Their legislation was so half-baked that they held no hearings on it and essentially forgot to come up with the “replace” part of “repeal and replace,” ensuring that if the bill passed the healthcare system would be thrown into chaos. The public was clearly opposed to repeal, and in the end, GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins voted against the bill, with John McCain delivering the final blow with a dramatic thumbs down. Sensible Republicans breathed a sigh of relief. Even when the filibuster is not in force, truly catastrophic ideas can be stopped.
Go ahead, make my day
Trump is arguing to Republicans that if they don’t eliminate the filibuster now, Democrats will do it anyway the next time they control the White House and Congress, so the GOP might as well take advantage of it while they can.
“If the Democrats ever came back into power, which would be made easier for them if the Republicans are not using the Great Strength and Policies made available to us by ending the Filibuster,” he posted on social media, “the Democrats will exercise their rights, and it will be done in the first day they take office, regardless of whether or not we do it.”
That might or might not be true. While there was an intense debate about the filibuster during the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency and a number of Democrats changed their mind and endorsed its elimination, in the end they couldn’t get the unanimity they needed to pass it. But context matters a great deal, for both sides.
For now, Senate Republicans, including their leader John Thune, are resisting Trump’s call to eliminate the filibuster. They may look around and see that Trump is accomplishing most of what they want through executive actions, from his harsh crackdown on immigrants to his war on renewable energy to his attack on higher education. They could try to codify all that into law, but why bother?
Once they passed their “Big Beautiful Bill” — with its tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, always the first priority of any Republican Congress — their legislative work was pretty much done. It’s not that they have no legislation they’d like to pass, but there isn’t anything so pressing that they’ll lose their minds if they don’t accomplish it.
When it comes to Democrats, on the other hand, Trump and Johnson may be at least partly right — or at least we should hope so.
We aren’t even a year into Trump’s second term, and the wreckage is already mind-boggling. If Democrats are fortunate enough to regain full control after the 2028 election, the task before them in rebuilding a demolished government, renewing a weakened economy, and recovering from the rampant corruption of the Trump years will be enormous — but so will the opportunity. It’s a good bet that the policy and political crisis facing the country will be even more acute than it is now, and they’ll be called to run on a program of sweeping political reform.
Getting rid of the filibuster — or at the very least altering it so it can no longer be simply a permanent minority veto — ought to be a part of that reform. Not only because it’s good for democracy, but because without it, the next Democratic presidency could be another story of delay and disappointment.
That’s it for today
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Thanks, Paul. My memory is pretty bad, but the most vivid memory I have of the destructive power of the filibuster was John Boehner during Obama’s first term. Then he hands the gavel to Moscow Mitch who is apparently a quicker learner than we all knew. They were so afraid of him (Obama)and what he might accomplish that they broke Congress. They drew their line in the sand and here we are. We can’t fix stupid bigoted people. They have to come to the realization themselves.
I agree with you that the filibuster has warped into a weapon and needs to be eliminated. It can also eliminate the choke hold the wannabe autocrat has on his own party. It frees those who would normally not go along with the crowd to vote their conscience without fear. Simple majority sounds good to me. Makes it easier to get rid of the crackpots and wingnuts. ❤️ And there’s nothing wrong with that❣️
Goading Republicans into killing the filibuster shows that Trump’s insight into politics is just as sharp as his business acumen.