The president’s view is that Republicans should simply ‘nuke’ the filibuster.
President Trump is calling on Republicans to end the filibuster in the Senate. That’s relatively predictable — he did it many times last time he was president — as well as futile — there are enough die-hard votes against doing so that it’s pointless to try. I think it’s also a bad idea for the reasons articulated by Senator McConnell in his Scalia Forum remarks at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. But the president feels otherwise.
The president’s view is that Republicans should simply “nuke” the filibuster, or change the rules with a simple majority to make it so that debate on legislation can end with a simple majority in support. This is what Chuck Schumer tried to do in 2022. He was stopped from doing so by Kyrsten Sinema.
When Senate floor strategy becomes a topic of the news, the private parliamentarians always chime in. Maybe there’s a way to nuke the filibuster just for this CR and then let it return as normal? Or maybe if Republicans enforce the “two speech rule,” they could require a talking filibuster until Democrats lose their ability to speak against the legislation, and then Republicans can just move to it on a simple majority. The latter is an idea that was floated — and rejected — when Democrats filibustered the nomination of Neil Gorsuch.
These stratagems to achieve majority rule while preserving the filibuster miss the forest for the trees. Senate Rules were not handed down from Mt. Sinai on stone tablets; they serve the purpose of legislation. The purpose of the filibuster is not — as Democrats argued in 2021 and 2022 — to ensure robust debate and allow everyone to be heard. It’s also not to impose costs on the majority in the course of getting things done. The legislative purpose of the filibuster is to give the minority the power to stop legislation cold.
In many cases, this allows the minority to shape legislation so that it is acceptable to enough senators that it clears the sixty-vote threshold. If the majority wants to enact substantial legislation, under the current understanding of the rules, the minority needs to have a say. If legislation has buy-in from both parties, it’s likelier to endure than if it relies on simple partisan muscle.
In other cases, it just stops legislation. There was no fixing H.R. 1 (“the corrupt politicians act”), so Republicans filibustered it and prevented the nationalizing of elections to the benefit of Democrats. That was the point. It wasn’t so that Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz could have their opinions heard in an empty Senate chamber. It wasn’t to ensure that the Democrats really wanted that policy initiative so much that they’d do the work necessary to get it. The point was to stop catastrophic policy, and Republicans did.
The way you beat a filibuster is with sixty votes. Assuming there is a parliamentary trick available that would allow Republicans to end debate on legislation with fewer than sixty votes, that doesn’t beat a filibuster; it ends it. Once you have established a process for enacting regular legislation below the sixty-vote threshold — however you get there procedurally — you have eliminated that threshold and with it the Senate’s unique empowerment of the minority.
I’m sure plenty of people think the president is right and that power should be stripped from the minority because Democrats will do it to Republicans in the future, and there’s, besides, so much great legislation we could pass with a simple majority. That’s an argument about what the vote threshold for legislation generally should be, not an argument about how to pass the CR.
Enough Senate Republicans are committed to preserving the power of minorities in their body that they won’t nuke the filibuster. That same commitment also means they aren’t interested in procedural shenanigans that would have the same effect. Again, process serves outcomes and many Senate Republicans want those legislative outcomes to be (generally) bipartisan. A process that sidesteps or undermines that, in their view, simply misses the point of the exercise.
There’s no “one weird trick” to get around the filibuster. Either the vote for most legislation should be at fifty or at sixty. That’s the sum total of the debate.