It Was The Best Of Filibusters, It Was The Worst Of Filibusters

American  Thinker 

I hate the filibuster. But I love the filibuster. It depends on the day and whether I need to call a tradesman to the house. Or simply a day to be “Papa Fix.” Who knows?

The filibuster is the spoiled child’s tirade against his mother, who sent him to clean up his room. Or it’s a sesquipedalian effort to prevent the majority from running roughshod over minority rights. It all depends on your vantage point. As a patriotic American—but I repeat myself—I see the current Democrat filibuster as a child’s temper tantrum.

Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill under “reconciliation,” a process that allows federal finances to be handled by a simple majority. Now Democrats are demanding that the Republicans give back the marbles they won fair and square.

With no sign that either side is going to budge, perhaps it’s worth looking at how we got here. First, a century before Christ, Cato the Younger happily filibustered the Roman Senate, forcing it to abandon various proposals since new laws had to be passed during the day. Over millennia, the practice popped up again and again. Basically, it was a way to kill a bill by talking it to death. You had to get the opposition to shut up to get a vote up or down.

The Senate and the House operate under their own distinct procedures. This means that anything can pass the House by a simple majority. However, beginning in 1806, the Senate rules required a supermajority to shut off debate and move to a vote. This “cloture” procedure once needed 75 of the 100 senators, but has been reduced at present to 60.

Because more than 40 Democrats oppose cloture, the Senate cannot even vote on the Continuing Resolution to fund the federal government. In the House, the Republicans got the CR through, and a majority, almost all Republicans, in the Senate have voted for it over a dozen times. So, this is clearly the “Schumer Shutdown.”

Present practice simply has the minority declaring a filibuster, sustaining it against a cloture vote, and then the Senate moving on to other tasks. There are advantages to this, in that routine business is not obstructed, but it takes the optics out of the process.

Democrats are claiming that Republicans are to blame for the pain resulting from the shutdown, while the Dems themselves are the ones preventing a vote that would re-open the government. Just imagine how the news would cover the Democrats talking around the clock against paying any government benefits. At the same time Republicans would be on all the news shows pointing out that a simple vote to open the government is being blocked by Dems. All those people not getting SNAP benefits might begin to see who their friends are. Or aren’t.

But it wasn’t until 2013 when Dem Harry Reid used a procedural move to block the tactic for nominees to Executive Branch and inferior Court positions that the “nuclear option” became a fact. Having opened the door, Mitch the Turtle crawled through it to remove the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, enabling Trump to place three excellent Justices on the Court.

The next move is the big problem. While I love having lots of our frivolous and toxic government shut down, there are core constitutional duties that must be performed, and we have to pay people to do them. Article I §9 clearly says that you can’t spend money that Congress hasn’t appropriated, hence the shutdown.

But this is clearly in tension with the unwritten (in the Constitution) need to defend the US against “all enemies foreign and domestic” (written in the Naturalization and Military Oaths). How can the President meet that demand when he can’t pay the military or law enforcement? It’s pretty clear that the Supreme Court would have a difficult question to answer there.

Is there a fix? Obviously, the Democrats would love for us to abolish the filibuster so they can blame Republicans for everything that passes. But their ultimate goal is to use it to pass Mamdani communism the next time they’re in power. While that’s a legitimate fear, what’s to stop them from doing it themselves if they regain a Senate majority?

On the other hand, if the current Republican majority looked at the current “reconciliation” rule, it would be very simple to remove the filibuster for everything that involves financing the government. This would leave all substantive changes in law alone, but remove the obstruction to continuing resolutions.

It would also get rid of the idea that we only have one financing bill that can be passed per year without being blocked by obstructionists. Under “regular order,” every single department funding bill could be passed by itself without obstruction.

But since we’re looking at the major choices, let’s consider heading the authoritarians off at the impasse by complete abolition of the filibuster. Dems would now be looking at some major law changes that would remove their electoral advantages. Imagine an election integrity law that requires:

• Voter Photo-ID
• In-person voting unless the voter simply cannot vote in person
• No ballots received after election day
• Early voting limited to seven days
• No ballot harvesting
• Citizenship verification
• Compact, regularly shaped Congressional districts defined by simply identifiable boundaries such as roads and physical geographic features
• Nobody establishing Congressional district boundaries may take into account any factor other than the total number of voting-age citizens residing therein.

Add in your favorite wish list item I missed. The result would be simple. Democrat election cheating would be almost eliminated. And that would reduce the chances of the communist party ever regaining a majority in the House. This would be a major benefit of completely eliminating the filibuster.

So Donald Trump may not be wrong. If the Dems ever get a Senate majority, they’ll probably eliminate the filibuster anyway, just to remove any influence pesky Republicans have by any means necessary. I guess that means that the next step needs to be a repeal of the 17th Amendment.