Here’s Why the Filibuster Is Just As Important If Not More So, Than the SAVE Act Right Now

Townhall 

Some days you sit down to write a column and realize all the ideas you have are going to piss a large section of the audience off. At that point, you have a choice to either pick one and plow ahead, anger be damned, or scrap the whole thing and write something that panders to readers because it’ll get a lot of “Hell, yeah!” comments. That pandering track just isn’t how I can roll, so here we go: While I support the SAVE Act, it is not necessary to win the midterms, nor is it worth blowing up the filibuster over. 

I know, I suck. I can hear some of you formulating the strongly worded email already. It doesn’t matter. You’re free to still send it, but it is not going to change my mind. 

Why did I come to this conclusion? Why have I forsaken President Donald Trump and the conservative agenda? I haven’t, not even a little. Let me explain my thinking:

This ain’t my first rodeo, I’ve been working in politics for, good lord, for the better part of three decades, including a stint in the US Senate. While the filibuster is annoying as hell, killing it to pass the SAVE Act would be like studying yoga so you could kick yourself in the groin – it’s a lot of effort for very little, if any, reward. 

I support everything the SAVE Act would do, but I prefer the filibuster for a few reasons. 

First, the idea that Republicans simply can’t win without voter ID ignores the reality that Republicans won 2 of the last 3 presidential elections (only losing a sketchy one during COVID when ballots were mailed around like the particles of an uncovered sneeze). Not only the presidential elections were won, the 2022 midterms were, too. 

In fact, since 1994, when the GOP took the House for the first time in 40 years, Republicans have won control of at least one chamber of Congress 21 times compared to the 11 times Democrats did. Of those Congresses, Republicans controlled both houses for 8 terms while Democrats only held both 3, with the rest being split. All with no voter ID.

That doesn’t mean Democrats don’t cheat, or that they’re positioning themselves to cheat more, it means that we can beat their best cheating (short of a pandemic) and we need poll watchers on a much larger scale while we wait for enough votes to pass the SAVE Act. 

Second, with an issue that 85-15 in favor of Republicans, use the hell out of it in the election. Make Democrats choke on blocking something so common sense and wildly popular. If you can’t do that, you’re the real problem. 

I understand that sometimes (more often than seems possible) Republicans couldn’t message their way out of a wet paper bag if their lives depended on it, but very few of those issues Republicans tripped over were as popular as protecting the integrity of the vote, nor were they as easy to talk about. If, as Democrats say, “the right to vote is sacrosanct,” why isn’t it worth it to literally do the least thing possible to protect the integrity of that vote? 

How many American votes are Democrats willing to have canceled out by illegal votes? Make them answer that. Hell, make them answer how many Americans murdered by illegal aliens will make them support mass deportations? No one is a murderer until they murder, and every American murdered by an illegal would still be alive were the illegal not allowed into the country…by Democrats.

The ads write themselves.

But the most important reason to keep the filibuster is that most of the time the filibuster helps the minority party stop bad things from happening. Republicans are the majority in the Senate right now, but they won’t be forever. When the Democrats killed the judicial filibuster in 2013 to stack the lower courts with a bunch of liberals…and it cost them three Supreme Court Justices. 

Decisions for immediate gratification have a funny way of biting you in the rear in politics, sooner rather than later.

By killing the filibuster to pass the SAVE Act, that would mean Democrats would be able to repeal it the same way. What good will it have done when that happens? It’s better to run good candidates, tell the voters what you want to do and why, and then actually do as many of those things as possible and keep fighting for the rest of them. 

Once the filibuster is gone, the Senate becomes the House with fewer members – simple majorities can push anything through, and Democrats will push through dramatic things like amnesty and citizenship for illegals, statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, socialized medicine, etc. While those things could then be repealed with a simple majority vote by Republicans, do you really think they would be? Remember how the repeal of Obamacare worked out? Do you think courts would allow mass citizenship repeal or the reversal of statehood? 

Is any of that, let alone all of it, worth something Republicans could get done with the proper strategy and learning how to message? If they were to kill the filibuster, do you really think it would go into effect before the midterms anyway? A court would slap an injunction on it faster than Chris Murphy could abandon his wife and kids for a much younger woman. Do you really think that would be resolved even before 2028? 

It sucks, I get it, but reality is not dependent upon anyone’s comfort level with it. Better to fight harder to win in the long term than pretending any particular battle will be the difference-maker in a war that will never end. 

I know, I’m the skunk at the garden party, but someone has to be. Sometimes you have to not only choose your battles wisely, but also your victories and how you get them. There are many ways to get the SAVE Act through Congress, one being the fastest and easiest does not mean it’s the best.