Today the filibuster has faded from public discussion. After all, the focus of policy gridlock has shifted to the House of Representatives (where absolute majorities already rule) and both parties are focused on dragging their unpopular presidential candidates over the finish line, rather than planning for thumping victories.
But the 2024 election could still decide the filibuster’s fate — and with it, the tempo of partisan warfare in the coming decades. Though neither party is advertising its intention to break the legislative filibuster, either one could try if it sweeps Congress and the White House. The Senate’s fraying check on majorities deserves to be a subject of debate as much as it was in 2020.
The next Congress will be a very different place. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the man who brushed off Donald Trump’s presidential entreaties to break the filibuster, announced last month that he will step down as GOP leader after 17 years. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), who barely prevented Democrats from breaking the filibuster during the Biden administration, announced her retirement last week. That’s on top of the departures of Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), pillars of centrism in their parties.
If not for Sinema’s steadfastness, in particular, the minority party might already be fully boxed out of Senate governance. When Democrats took only 50 Senate seats in 2021, it looked for a moment like their filibuster-smashing ambitions might be tempered. Not for long: In 2022, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) launched a major push to force sweeping changes to state voting laws on a party-line vote. That would have required changing Senate rules — the “nuclear option” — to overcome a GOP filibuster.
Sinema resisted, dooming the effort. In a landmark speech on the Senate floor, she called the filibuster a “guardrail” in American politics. “When one party need only negotiate with itself,” she said, “policy will inextricably be pushed from the middle towards the extremes.” That speech, among other heresies, appears to have ended Sinema’s political career — blocking her path to reelection in Arizona in 2024 even as she changed her political affiliation to independent.
McConnell’s role as a filibuster guardian is different from Sinema’s. Instead of an apostate, he is a partisan warrior. He was at the center of the partisan escalation that saw Democrats, led by then-Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.), break the filibuster for lower-court judicial nominees in 2013, and Republicans do the same for Supreme Court justices in 2017. But McConnell’s escalations were carefully controlled and never extended to the legislative filibuster, on which he rebuffed Trump repeatedly while the GOP controlled both houses. “It does, I think, generate on many occasions kind of a bipartisan solution, and I don’t think that’s always bad for the country,” he told Politico in 2018.
The next generation of Republican senators, who never knew a Senate before the filibuster started to erode, might not be as restrained. Trump’s argument is that if the GOP doesn’t eliminate the filibuster, Democrats will do it as soon as they get the chance, attaining a first-mover advantage. That argument will be a whole lot harder to rebut in a second Trump term after Democrats came so close to going nuclear in 2022 with the narrowest possible majority.
It might be that Sinema was just the tip of the iceberg of Democratic opposition to Schumer’s 2022 gambit and that institutional reluctance to change Senate rules is deeper than it appears. Perhaps it would be another Democratic senator, such as Chris Coons (Del.) or Jon Tester (Mont.), who would fall on his sword in a second Biden term and disappoint the party base. And there are enough moderate senators on the GOP side, such as Susan Collins (Maine) and Todd Young (Ind.), that it would probably require a large Republican Senate margin for the party to go nuclear at Trump’s behest.
There could be something about the Senate’s size, structure and its members’ longer terms and special prerogatives that make the institution inherently resist becoming a purely majoritarian body like the House. But given recent history, there is no guarantee. Whoever is president in 2025 could also enjoy partisan majorities in Congress (though 50 Senate seats might be the Democrats’ best case). The upper chamber will have fewer members resistant to procedural escalation than before.
That means party-line solutions on issues such as abortion, immigration, elections and courts will look more attractive in the coming years. Divided government can be dysfunctional, but the alternative might increasingly be a cycle of partisan excess. Voters in 2024 will need to weigh which is worse.
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