A Republic, If You Can Count to 51: Why the Filibuster’s Demise Could Save Democracy

Let debate rage for days, then vote, as the founders intended; end the antique veto and force both parties to own their visions before the people…

Emperor Trump saw this wipeout election coming and he knew who to blame in advance: the Senate. On Tuesday (election day) morning, he posted to his Nazi-infested social media site:

“TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER NOW, END THE RIDICULOUS SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATELY, AND THEN, MOST IMPORTANTLY, PASS EVERY WONDERFUL REPUBLICAN POLICY THAT WE HAVE DREAMT OF, FOR YEARS, BUT NEVER GOTTEN. WE WILL BE THE PARTY THAT CANNOT BE BEATEN – THE SMART PARTY!!!”

Republicans yawned and ignored him; they’ve been hiding behind the filibuster for decades to avoid having to actually take a serious vote on the crazy crap that Republicans in the House keep sending them, like bills to outlaw abortion nationally, end voting rights for married women, or end climate protections and deregulate the fossil fuel industry.

Ending the filibuster — even now with King Crazy in the White House — would be a good thing for both Democrats and America. And Trump may actually pull it off.

Yesterday morning Trump imperially doubled down as he marched into the Senate Republicans’ breakfast meeting and loudly proclaimed his belief that Democrats won the elections Tuesday night almost exclusively because voters failed to blame Democrats for the government shutdown.

“I don’t think they’re getting really the blame [for the shutdown] that they should,” Trump told the senators, according to The New York Times. He added, “I don’t think it [the shutdown] was good for Republicans. I’m not sure it was good for anybody.”

After that bit of understatement, he began to harangue his people about ending the shutdown by ending the filibuster. Senate Majority Leader John Thune could put government back to work in a single day (or less) by simply putting forward a motion to change the Senate rules and end the filibuster.

Ironically, because it’s a simple change to the rules of the Senate rather than a piece of legislation, the process of ending the filibuster cannot be filibustered: it takes only 51 votes, and there are 53 GOP senators right now, plus the Vice President.

“If you don’t terminate the filibuster, you’ll be in bad shape,” the Times reports Dear Leader Trump told the senators yesterday morning. “We won’t pass any legislation.”

Semafor’s Burgess Everett reported yesterday that Republican senators Senators Susan Collins (ME), Ted Cruz (TX), John Neely Kennedy (LA), Lisa Murkowski (AK), Rand Paul (KY) and Thom Tillis (NC) all want to be able to continue to hide behind the filibuster. It’ll take a few Democratic votes to make this happen, but several progressives, including Bernie Sanders, have long argued the filibuster should be ended.

If Trump succeeds in bending the will of enough of his GOP senators to end the filibuster, while it’ll cause short-term pain for Americans, it may well be the best thing for both Democrats and our nation in the long term.

Here’s how and why, but first it’s useful to know the history of the filibuster, why it was put into the Senate’s rules, and how it’s been changed over the past few decades.

Most Americans think the filibuster is what was portrayed in Frank Capra’s 1939 movie, starring Jimmy Stewart, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.

They believe that if senators have a principled objection to a piece of legislation, they can simply stand on the floor of the Senate and pontificate about it, preventing any possibility of a vote on it as long as the filibuster supporters remain together on the floor of the Senate and one of them is standing and speaking. When they and all their friends have exhausted all their words or can’t keep 40 senators in the chamber, then the filibuster ends and the vote happens.

That’s how it used to work in our grandparents generation. In actual practice today, however, that’s not how it works at all. All a Republican has to do in this modern era to filibuster a Democratic bill (or vice a versa) is to simply object to a vote being held on that particular piece of legislation. They can even do it by email.

The filibuster was made possible by a Senate rule change in 1806, but didn’t actually get used as a serious way to block debate on legislation until the arrival of “Father of the Confederacy” John C. Calhoun in the Senate; he began using it aggressively in 1837 to block any discussion of the abolition of slavery. (The year before, in 1836, the House had banned any discussion of slavery at all, a law John Quincy Adams delighted in breaking every day the House was in session.)

When a senator invoked a filibuster, it ground the entire Senate to a halt until the originally proposed legislation was withdrawn, causing the near-instant death of numerous attempts by Northern senators to weaken or cripple laws relating to slavery in the South. There was quite literally no way around it, or to continue Senate business, other than to withdraw the proposed legislation or the filibuster objection to it.

Over the years since, the 2/3rds requirement was reduced to 3/5ths (60 votes today), senators can now invoke a filibuster with an email, and “two-track” was introduced so filibusters don’t slow down other Senate business, but the filibuster itself remained on a single issue or proposed law.

In 1980, Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker (R-TN) amended the “Constitutional Option” to exclude taxing and spending legislation from being filibustered.

Today we call this “Budget Reconciliation” or just “reconciliation” and it’s been used over 25 times, most recently to pass Trump’s “Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill.”

Mitch McConnell expanded the Constitutional Option/Nuclear Option in April of 2017 when Democrats declared an intent to filibuster Trump’s first SCOTUS nominee, Neal Gorsuch, who replaced Merrick Garland as the nominee-in-waiting when President Obama’s term in office expired. Republicans changed the rules and ended filibusters for all federal judges.

Thus, two of the duties of the Senate listed in the Constitution — appropriating and spending money, and ratifying the President’s judicial nominees — are today exempt from the filibuster.

And Trump is right: it’s time to stop letting them play these games for regular legislation like that necessary to reopen the government.

Both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate have been hiding behind the filibuster for decades, and it really needs to stop.

— Democrats propose great laws like the For The People Act that would have blown up the corrupt Citizens United decision. When bought-off Dems like Manchin and Sinema refused to vote to break or end the filibuster, their donors were happy that the status quo was preserved, and everybody shrugged and blamed the filibuster.

— Republicans push legislation through the House that would privatize Social Security, gut Medicare, end food stamps or unemployment insurance, or freeze the borrowing power of the federal government. When Democrats filibuster those toxic bills, they can tell their billionaire donors that they tried.

If the filibuster is ended, though, the Senate will have to deal with actual democracy, a simple majority vote. Things would get real very, very fast.

Republicans would have to face the insanity and unpopularity of much of the wackadoodle stuff coming out of the GOP-controlled House. And Democrats could actually get some important things done, once they’re back in power.

As The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board pointed out Monday night in an editorial calling for Trump to back off his effort to end the filibuster:

“Recall what probably would have passed in the Biden years without the filibuster check.
• Bernie Sanders’s $17-an-hour national minimum wage.
• All of the Biden Build Back Better plan, with its huge tax increases and cradle-to-grave entitlement programs.
• Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s bill to restructure the Supreme Court.
• Nancy Pelosi’s bill to nationalize election law in all 50 states on the California model.
• Statehood for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, with four new Democratic Senators.
• The PRO Act that would repeal much of Taft-Hartley on unionization and ban right-to-work laws for voluntary union membership that exist in 26 states.
• A national law codifying Roe v. Wade abortion standards.”

If Chuck Schumer had succeeded in ending the filibuster (as he tried with the For The People and John Lewis Voting Rights bills), the Supreme Court would now be under a code of ethics, it would be illegal for billionaires to fund elections with dark money, we’d have 4 more Democratic senators, there’d be a rational national minimum wage, etc.

All it should take is 51 votes, as the Constitution requires. Again, the filibuster is not in that document, and the Founders and Framers rejected it in debates in Philadelphia in 1787 when they wrote the Constitution.

With those changes, with Elon Musk (and over 100 other billionaire families) blocked from dumping hundreds of millions into Trump’s race and those of Republicans in the House and Senate like they did last year, its a virtual certainty that we’d today have a Democratic president and Democratic control of both the House and Senate.

So, yeah, if it’s going to take a demented wannabe dictator to force weakling senators to end the filibuster — this pro-slavery remnant of the 19th century — by all means let’s encourage our senators of both parties to make it happen. Call yours at 202-224-3121 and let them know you “support ending the filibuster for good.”

So let’s get behind this change in the rules of the Senate to say that there can be plenty of debate, lots of debate, hours and even days of debate, but at the end, there must be a vote and when that vote is taken the majority will prevail…as the Founders intended.

Louise’s Daily Song: “A Republic if You Can Keep It”

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