Trump is Right: The Filibuster is Probably Toast

Even if Republicans aren’t the ones to pull the trigger.

Happy Monday! We have a big week ahead of us in American politics:

• Tomorrow is Election Day: voters in Virginia and New Jersey will pick their next governor, while residents of New York City will pick their next mayor. Plus, the future of the U.S. House could hinge on a redistricting referendum in California, and Pennsylvanians will vote on three state Supreme Court seats. I’ll have a full preview for you on Tuesday, and then a roundup of the results on Wednesday.

• Wednesday are the Supreme Court oral arguments on President Trump’s tariffs, one of the most important cases to reach the justices in years, with huge implications for the future of the economy and the future of presidential power. After flirting with the idea, Trump said yesterday that he won’t be attending the hearing — but I will be. You’ll read my inside-the-courtroom report on Thursday.

• Meanwhile, the government shutdown drags on. On Wednesday, it will reach its 36th day, becoming the longest shutdown in U.S. history. The fate of SNAP benefits remain unclear at this hour: a federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to fund the program by the end of the day, and to confirm they will be doing so by noon today. Obamacare open enrollment began on Saturday, which means Americans who buy health insurance through the law’s marketplace started seeing higher premiums with enhanced subsidies poised to expire.

I can’t tell you at this point where any of these stories will end up — but I can promise you that I will be here to guide you through all of it. I’m proud to say my recent coverage of stories like Trump’s nominee withdrawal record, the House’s unprecedented recess, and the government shutdown have been cited in outlets including Politico, the Guardian, the Free Press, the Daily Beast, the New Republic, National Review, and even by NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

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OK, now it’s time for this morning’s newsletter. We’ll be talking a lot about elections and the Supreme Court throughout the week. For today, let’s return to one of our favorite topics here at Wake Up To Politics: the filibuster.

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On Thursday night, shortly after returning from a mid-shutdown trip to Asia, President Trump called on Republican lawmakers to end the funding gap by ending the filibuster, the Senate rule that requires most pieces of legislation to receive 60 votes in order to advance.

“It is now time for the Republicans to play their ‘TRUMP CARD,’ and go for what is called the Nuclear Option — Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. He then repeated the message in an interview recorded on Friday and in social media posts on Saturday and Sunday.

Here are 12 thoughts:

#1: This is a new development in the current funding spat, but it is not a surprising development overall. Trump called for the filibuster to be eliminated in his first term, using the same logic as he did in his Truth Social posts: that if Republicans don’t do it, Democrats will.

#2: Senate Republicans have been chipping away at the filibuster all year, expanding existing filibuster exceptions to enable overturning a broader sweep of executive branch policies with only 51 votes and to allow for policies with enormous price tags to be scored as costing $0 so they can advance through the reconciliation process. That said, they probably will not heed Trump’s call to ditch the 60-vote requirement entirely.

After the president’s Truth Social post, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-WY) reiterated their opposition to ending the filibuster, as did several rank-and-file Senate Republicans. Just as they did in his first term, the Senate GOP appears poised to buck Trump on this. (Sidenote: It isn’t their only rebuke of the president in recent days, and it’s also not the only Senate rules change Trump has been pushing for that Republicans have resisted.)

#3: President Trump wrote on Saturday that “the Democrats will terminate the Filibuster the first chance they get,” noting that “their two objectors are gone!!!” Addressing Republicans, he added: “Don’t be WEAK AND STUPID. FIGHT,FIGHT, FIGHT! WIN, WIN, WIN!”

Let’s pause on considering the merits of the filibuster for a moment. As a matter of political analysis, Trump is probably right: Democrats are likely to eliminate the filibuster the next time they win a trifecta (that is, the next time they control the White House, Senate, and House). Let’s game it out.

Changing the Senate rules is supposed to require 67 senators, but a tactic known as the “nuclear option” — which the two parties have already used to end the filibuster on nominations — allows it to be effectively done with 51. In a Democratic trifecta scenario, a Democratic vice president would be able to break ties in the Senate, so really you only need to count to 50.

All 47 Senate Democrats are on the record in support of dramatically curtailing (if not outright abolishing) the filibuster. 39 of them voted to exempt a voting rights bill from the filibuster in 2022, which would have been tantamount to ending the legislative filibuster completely. The other eight were not in the Senate at the time, but all of them (Angela Alsobrooks, Lisa Blunt Rochester, John Fetterman, Ruben Gallego, Andy Kim, Adam Schiff, Elissa Slotkin, and Peter Welch) campaigned on ending the filibuster.

The easiest path to a Democratic Senate majority by 2029 (the next possible time they could have a trifecta) is probably maintaining all of the seats they have now, plus flipping Maine and North Carolina in 2026, and then flipping Wisconsin in 2028.

One Maine Democratic Senate candidate, Graham Platner, has already said he would abolish the filibuster. Another, Janet Mills, has said she wouldn’t, and Roy Cooper in North Carolina hasn’t weighed in yet. But, when push comes to shove, I highly doubt that either of these creatures of the Democratic Party establishment would stand in the way of ending the filibuster if the entire rest of the party pressured them to do so. For one thing, it is difficult to think of a single issue on which either of them have bucked the national Democratic party line.

For another, Cooper would be 75 and Mills would be 85 at the end of a first Senate term: it’s highly likely that, if either of them are elected, they will never run for office again, so it’s not as if ending the filibuster would come at a huge cost for their personal political prospects (even if Mills, for instance, is trying to win the seat now by claiming she would keep the filibuster. You can already imagine the “I intended to vote to keep the filibuster, but Republican obstruction has forced me to…” statement now.)

That leaves, I don’t know, hypothetical Wisconsin Sen. Josh Kaul in 2028? (Another establishment Democrat who would be unlikely to buck the party line if elected.) And then you’ve arrived at 50, plus — let’s just throw a name out here — Vice President Gretchen Whitmer or whoever else. (Whitmer is currently the betting favorite to be the Democratic VP nominee in 2028, according to the prediction market Kalshi.)

I am by no means saying Democrats will keep all of their current Senate seats or flip these other three (or that they will win the White House or House, of course). But this whole conversation is premised on the hypothetical scenario of Democrats winning a trifecta. If they do manage to win a trifecta, the above is what it would look like. And it looks to me like one that would be highly likely to eliminate the filibuster.

As Trump noted, the Democrats’ “two objectors” — Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — have, indeed, been run out of the Senate. In fact, they’ve been run out of the Democratic Party completely, a message to anyone who might be thinking of dissenting last time. Sinema’s successor, Democrat Ruben Gallego, made his opposition to the filibuster a cornerstone of his campaign to replace her.

I know that was a long explanation, but I think it’s worth walking through to bear out that Trump is most likely correct about his analysis that the filibuster is not long for this world. All you have to do is run the numbers, and listen to Senate Democrats’ own statements. If Republicans don’t take the opportunity to abolish the filibuster now and put some policy wins on the board, Trump is probably right that they will live to regret it later.

#4: This speaks to a difference in the two parties’ coalitions. Republican senators are simply — surprise, surprise — a more small-c conservative bunch than Democratic senators. On the Republican side, it’s hard to find any senators who support eliminating the filibuster, even though their own party’s president is calling for it. There are Republicans like Mitch McConnell who would plainly never go for it. On the Democratic side, on the other hand, it’s hard to find any senators who don’t support it.

Even a Democrat like Fetterman who you might expect to buck the national party has actually been opposed to the filibuster for longer than most other Democrats (in fact, right now, he’s saying Republicans should get rid of it and calling the rest of his party hypocritical for opposing the filibuster in 2022 but supporting it now). Interestingly, one of the types of Democratic candidates who could potentially win Senate seats in red and purple states — the more populist Fettermans or Dan Osborns of the world — is also the type that is generally against the filibuster the most. (Osborn, a Nebraska Independent who is running again in 2026 after running a better-than-expected campaign in 2024 is also on the record against the filibuster).

#5: Is the filibuster’s looming end a good thing for the country? I can tell two stories:

Story Number One: Our politics are broken, and this is one of the key defects at the heart of it: every four years, we have these huge presidential campaigns … people pour a lot of time, money, sweat, tears, attention, and emotion into them … they animate our country and huge swaths of voters get invested in them … and then (usually) voters elect one party to the White House, House, and Senate … and almost nothing of lasting consequence happens.

Because of the Senate filibuster, no matter which party wins control of the government, it is very difficult to get legislation across the finish line, which means most of the policy action in Washington flows away from the representative branch of government (Congress) and towards the executive and judicial branches. Political insiders know when candidates are campaigning on a laundry list of policy promises that most of them will never happen, but many voters don’t and find this highly frustrating. Didn’t we just elect you to do X, Y, and Z, and now you’re telling me you can’t do any of it? This is part of why faith in government has collapsed, and politics has turned into each successive president trying to one-up each other with potentially unconstitutional power grabs (while the Senate looks for creative ways to get around the filibuster anyway).

Politics is supposed to be representative, and if Democrats or Republicans win elections, they should be able to enact the agenda that voters asked for. Then, two or four years later, if voters like how that agenda went, they can vote to keep it going; if not, they can vote for the other guys. Our politics would once again be aligned with policy outcomes (because policy outcomes could actually be achieved) rather than being reduced to politicians shouting past each other about random culture wars, knowing full well they won’t be able to get much done once in office.

Story Number Two: Do you think American politics is chaotic right now? Just wait until you see American politics without the filibuster!

The American electorate is a very fickle beast: they voted for Republicans to control the House, Senate, and White House in 2016 … then for Democrats to do the same four years later … and then for Republicans to take control again four years after that. Thankfully, because of the filibuster, this didn’t impose outsized chaos on the electorate— but imagine if the 60-vote rule wasn’t there. Republicans might have imposed national voter ID laws, and then Democrats could have removed them, and then Republicans would have put them back. You could have Obamacare be repealed, then expanded into Medicare For All, then repealed again. Abortion could be banned, then legalized, then banned. One party might add four new Supreme Court justices, then the other party could add five more, then the next party could add 10 more.

That’s no way to run a railroad. Countries rely on stability, and the filibuster is the last modicum of stability we have left. The U.S. economy, not to mention foreign policy, could not possibly survive such massive shifts every four years — how would businesses plan for the future, or the military plan long-term strategy, if suddenly everything is subject to change as soon as a new trifecta is installed?

American politics is not supposed to be representative, at least not purely. It’s supposed to be consensus-based, which is why the Senate (the proverbial cooling saucer) exists in the first place. It’s true that Democrats won a majority in 2020, and Republicans won a majority now, but they were slim majorities! If you want to enact lasting policy change, you should command a broad-based majority: something on the order of, I don’t know, 60 Senate seats, perhaps? And if you don’t have such a sweeping majority, you should have to work with the other party and participate in the bipartisan negotiating process that the filibuster encourages, and which worked fairly well as recently as the Biden era, when major bills on infrastructure, manufacturing, political reform, and more surpassed the 60-vote threshold.

#6: Of course, you can poke holes in both of these stories. For example, while I do believe ending the filibuster would unlock a host of changes to our policy status quo — you can pick whether you view that as refreshing or chaotic — it’s also true that some of the policy changes I laid out above probably wouldn’t happen. On some issues, the filibuster serves as a convenient excuse to mask the fact that parties not only don’t have 60 votes to do something: they don’t even have 50. A Republican Party unencumbered by the filibuster would probably not be able to implement a national abortion ban, nor would a Democratic Party likely achieve Medicare for All.

#7: In theory, there are also middle-ground solutions available to either party if they choose to take them. You could keep the filibuster, but lower the threshold to, say, 55 votes instead of 60. That way, parties would still need either a reasonably large majority or to work across party lines in order to achieve policy change, but not have to get to such a large majority or so many senators from the other party. (In the 21st century, for context, parties have won 55-seat majorities in the Senate three times, and 60-seat majorities only once.) I like the idea of combining this reform with an open amendment process, where each party could propose some amount of amendments, so a modicum of bipartisanship is preserved even if it’s easier for partisan (or mostly partisan) majorities to move legislation.

Or you could restore the Mr. Smith-style talking filibuster: currently, if a minority party wants to block a piece of legislation from advancing, all they have to do is hold a vote and prove the majority party doesn’t have 60 senators in support. The majority party can keep holding votes (as Republicans are doing now with the stopgap spending bill), but as long as there aren’t 60 “yea” votes, nothing happens with the bill. As it stands, it’s a pretty passive process. Alternatively, you could force the blocking party to hold the Senate floor and talk for as long as they can in order to block a bill. When they stop talking, a final vote is held.

Another version of that proposal, which would extract less pain from the blocking party but still more than currently, would be to flip things so that instead of needing 60 votes to end debate on a bill, you need 41 votes to continue debate. As it stands, the minority party doesn’t even need to show up to a cloture vote: if the vote is 59-0, cloture is denied. This wouldn’t make it so opponents of a cloture would have to constantly be talking — but it would so at least 41 opponents of a cloture motion would have to actually be present on the Senate floor, ready to vote at any time against the bill they’re blocking.

#8: Personally, if I were designing changes to the Senate, I wouldn’t necessarily start with the filibuster. Instead, I would look at ways to change how bills reach the Senate floor in the first place — so that the Senate Majority Leader maintains some amount of agenda control (they do lead the majority, after all), while still normalizing rank-and-file senators forcing votes on pieces of legislation with broad support.

Right now, for example, there are several major bills that have filibuster-proof support in the Senate — on Russia sanctions, Medicare cancer coverage, telehealth, child online safety, and Medicare Advantage — but that Thune has yet to schedule for a vote. What if there was a requirement that once a bill receives 60 co-sponsors (as these bills have), it is guaranteed a vote on the floor?

If your goal is making Congress more productive, that’s where I would start. (If just the five aforementioned bills were to pass, it would make for a reasonably productive session of the Senate.) Of course, that isn’t either party’s goal here: they want to pass more partisan bills, not bipartisan legislation. Nevertheless, this idea would be a way to keep the filibuster and encourage more of the sort of bipartisan productivity that the filibuster claims to encourage (but doesn’t always in practice).

#9: A stray thought on Trump. Everything else aside, it has been somewhat refreshing to see the president talking about a legislative agenda over the last few days, as he’s mused about what might be possible for Republicans to achieve without the filibuster. After Trump said last week that he didn’t need to pass any more bills through Congress, it’s nice to hear him at least remembering that there’s a legislative branch.

That speaks to one of the arguments for ditching the filibuster (though not the one that either Bernie Sanders on the left or MTG on the right are making): that it would hand more power, or at least relevance, to Congress, ensuring that our policy conversations aren’t just presidents doing things and the Supreme Court allowing or striking them down — but they would also start to involve the branch of government that is supposed to represent a broad cross-section of Americans.

#10: A stray thought on Democrats. It’s been amusing over the last few weeks to watch some Democrats trying to basically goad Republicans into ending the filibuster during the shutdown. I think part of this is because Democrats want the filibuster to be eliminated — as explained above — but are afraid of the political consequences of doing so and would rather Republicans do their “dirty work” for them, so to speak.

I’ve found this amusing because — for what it’s worth — I think this concern is misplaced, and it makes for a funny example of Democrats constantly being afraid of their shadow. Only a third of Americans know what the filibuster is, and surely that third knows how they are voting in every election. For whichever party eventually ends the filibuster, I don’t anticipate it to come with much of a political price (on its own, that is: there could still be a political price for enacting unpopular policies after the filibuster’s gone).

#11: Now back to the shutdown. To the extent the public is paying attention to Trump’s calls to end the filibuster — again, most voters don’t even know what it is — I can’t imagine it’s helping Republicans, who are already losing the shutdown public opinion battle, to have the president broadcasting the message that Republicans could end the shutdown, instead of keeping the pressure on Democrats to do so (especially when he isn’t even likely to get anything out of the gambit, since Republicans aren’t following his lead here).

As for how the shutdown will end, Republicans dismissing Trump on the filibuster means the resolution will still have to be bipartisan. According to The Hill, eight moderate Senate Democrats have been meeting in hopes of putting together a bipartisan deal this week. We’ll see if that bears fruit.

#12: And, finally, let’s zoom out. If Donald Trump and I are right that the filibuster is on death’s door, then it’s the biggest meteor about hit American politics that no one is really talking about.

I think there’s a good chance that historians of the future will look at the presidencies of the 2000s-2020s and be genuinely confused why they achieved so little: One party controlled Washington for four whole years and all they got was a health care law or a tax cut law? For better or for worse — again, I’m not trying to tell you which — there will simply be a lot more on the table for post-filibuster presidencies to accomplish. It will mean that presidencies will be judged on completely different terms, and make the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations look measly in comparison, considering the sheer amount of a president’s agenda that will soon be able to be achieved, as opposed to now, when the president can mostly just hope for one reconciliation bill and then a bunch of executive orders that their successor will reverse.

Things will look a lot different once the filibuster is gone and politicians are playing with live ammo, knowing that they will have to work to enact a much more chock-full legislative agenda and the pressure will be on to actually make good on things they campaign on.