President Trump wants to do away with the filibuster in order to pass the Save America Act. But many Senate Republicans are reluctant, wary of what it would mean if they were to lose their majority.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
The Senate filibuster. At first, it meant a long speech that a lawmaker could use to obstruct a vote. But today, senators can filibuster a bill without even needing to speak. President Trump wants to end the practice in order to pass his proof of citizenship voting bill. Here he is stumping for it in Memphis last month.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: If you could get rid of the filibuster, it would be great. It would be great. Get rid of the filibuster and get it all done.
CHANG: Is his pressure campaign enough? Here’s NPR congressional reporter Eric McDaniel.
ERIC MCDANIEL, BYLINE: You’d think there’s nothing more perilous in politics than the flip-flop. But it seems like every modern Senate leader has been on all sides of the filibuster. When you’re in the minority, it’s a vital tool to preserve your rights and build consensus.
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CHUCK SCHUMER: Without the 60-vote threshold for legislation, the Senate becomes a majoritarian institution like the House, much more subject to the winds of short-term electoral change.
MCDANIEL: That was Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in 2017, when Republicans killed the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees. And here’s Schumer in 2022, a majority leader trying to sidestep the tool in order to pass his party’s own voting rights bill.
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SCHUMER: But the Senate was never envisioned to allow an absolute minority party veto. Never. In fact, the founders expressly rejected the inclusion of a supermajority requirement for the Senate.
MCDANIEL: Mitch McConnell championed the filibuster as a tool that forces compromise when Democrats weakened it in 2013. Then McConnell weakened it himself a few years later after he became the Senate’s majority leader. Now Republicans are contending with Democratic opposition to the SAVE America Act, which would require folks to show proof of citizenship before voting. Some of them want to do away with the silent filibuster and go back to making legislators talk until they can’t anymore in order to force a bill to clear the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold. Here’s Utah’s Mike Lee on “The Charlie Kirk Show” last year.
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MIKE LEE: You enforce the rules by requiring them to debate. And then the minute they stop debating – if they’ve exhausted either themselves physically or their right to speak – that moment, you can call the vote.
MCDANIEL: It’s, well, a lot harder in practice. Republican senators would have to stay in the Senate chamber to prevent other parliamentary shenanigans. And regardless, Majority Leader John Thune says that he just can’t make the numbers work to change or end the filibuster. Here he is talking to Fox News in March.
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JOHN THUNE: We don’t have 51 votes for that in the United States Senate.
MCDANIEL: And maybe the math changes under pressure from Trump. Though, depending on how you’re counting, the filibuster’s lasted for nearly 200 years, so it’s got momentum. And the case to keep the filibuster is clear enough. If you want laws to pass with more consensus, requiring more than a simple majority in order to pass them is useful. But in a Congress that already struggles to pass things, where virtually everything now gets filibustered, could lowering the bar add some life back to the Hill?
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SARAH BINDER: We have this notion that the filibuster’s like this principle of unlimited debate to protect minority interests and so forth. But as we discovered, it’s really just politics. It’s brute-force politics.
MCDANIEL: That’s Sarah Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University, talking to NPR’s Throughline podcast in 2022. And the question is, does the Senate need to do more to protect the viewpoint of the minority? Filibuster critics point out that every state already gets two senators, regardless of the size. That means if you live in a less populous place, like Wyoming, you effectively get more than 65 times the Senate representation that someone living in California does. For now, it seems like President Trump’s hopes of adding proof of citizenship requirements to elections nationwide are dashed. But if history is any guide on the filibuster, you never have to wait that long for folks to change their mind. Eric McDaniel, NPR News, Washington.
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