Donald Trump—juggling a war that shows more signs every week of dragging on far longer than he imagined, a nation of enraged air travelers, and a day of protests against him that was the largest of its kind in American history—is still making time to attack American democracy. He’s leaning hard on Senate GOP leader John Thune to ditch the filibuster and pass the party’s voter-suppression bill, the SAVE America Act. The president posted late last week: “When is ‘enough, enough’ for our Republican Senators. There comes a time when you must do what should have been done a long time ago, and something which the Lunatic Democrats will do on day one, if they ever get the chance. TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER, and get our airports, and everything else, moving again. Also, add the complete, all five items, SAVE AMERICA ACT items. Go for the Gold!!!”
I have less than no use for the SAVE America Act. Like a lot of liberals I know, I’d be fine with a reasonable law that required voters to present ID. But this bill isn’t that. Under such a reasonable law, for example, a driver’s license should constitute valid ID. Under this bill, however, a regular driver’s license—which is the standard issue of 45 states, with only five states offering the Enhanced Driver’s License that the act deems kosher—would not suffice. That’s absurd. More importantly, the act is—as many have pointed out, including Norman Ornstein on this website—effectively a poll tax, requiring registered voters to reregister with proof of citizenship. (Do you even know where your birth certificate is? Do you still live in the same state where you were born?)
The idea of requiring an ID to vote polls very well, but the act itself, once people are informed of the specifics, does far less well. Besides all that, it’s a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Even the Heritage Foundation, creator of an “Election Fraud Map” presumably designed with the intent of raising the alarm about this alleged pestilence, could find only 1,620 cases of people being criminally convicted or paying a civil penalty for voter fraud—going back to 1982. How many Americans have voted since 1982? It has to be several billion. And even a right-wing outfit with a clear agenda couldn’t scrape up even 2,000 offenders!
So it would be awful for the country and for democracy if the SAVE America Act passed. And it would be, on one level, appalling to watch Thune cave to Trump one more time and nuke the filibuster (which he reportedly is not of a mind to do). And yet … even though it would cause some short-term pain, in the long run I’d love to see the GOP nuke the filibuster. You should too, and here’s why.
Basically, liberalism and the Democratic Party have a long list of legislative achievements they’d like to pass into law. On wages, the economy, federal benefits, health care, primary and secondary education, higher education, the environment, monopoly power, tech power, and so much more, there are bills sitting around in Congress that various Democrats have dutifully written. They’re mostly pretty good. Some—in fact, I’d say most—have a Republic cosponsor or two.
Conservatism and the Republican Party, by contrast, have no such agenda and are sitting on no such trove of bills. Their domestic agenda can be summed up in five words: reduce taxes and cut regulation. Sure, there are a few other things: Throw out immigrants, keep boys out of girls’ sports, and of course crack down on an epidemic (voter fraud) that doesn’t exist. But that’s about it for them. Meanwhile, the Democrats—the party of government—want, quite logically, the government to do a lot of things.
Now imagine that it’s January 21, 2029, and somehow it has come to pass that we have a Democratic president, 53 Democratic senators (with nary a Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema in the bunch), and 229 Democratic House members. Full control of government, in other words.
What could these majorities do? Well, with the filibuster in place—which requires 60 senators to overcome—not much of anything, really. Oh, they’d pass a few things, as Joe Biden managed to. But it would be pulling teeth the whole way, and the American public would mostly see more dysfunction. And dysfunction always, always, always benefits the party of anti-government, because all they need to do is point their fingers and say, “Look? See what a mess the federal government is?”
Now let’s ask ourselves what these hypothetical majorities could do if there were no filibuster, and they could pass bills in both houses with simple majorities. It would depend on how aggressive they want to be—more on which later—but assuming a reasonable level of zeal to do what they came to Washington to do and pass laws that make people’s lives better, they could pass bill after bill after bill.
First, they could undo the SAVE America act and pass their own voting rights law. Then starts the real work. An $18 minimum wage, and indexed to inflation so that Congress never has to hike it again—done. An overtime pay bill, vastly expanding the number of American workers eligible for overtime—done. A permanent child tax credit—done. A bill to make, say, vocational schools and community colleges free—done. A bill to expand rural broadband; to jumpstart green energy projects; to offer subsidized childcare to working parents; to grant a period of paid family leave, like they have in 145 countries; to build affordable housing units—done, done, done, done, and done. And then: cracking down on monopolies, on Ticketmaster, on crypto and AI. Those things would take more guts, but I’d like to think the party would do at least some of them.
Imagine Americans’ reaction to seeing all this activity. For the first time in ages, they’d be seeing not bickering and dysfunction, but one party actually passing laws that make their lives a little better! They could, if they wished to, make FDR’s first 100 days look lackadaisical by comparison.
And once they passed these things? They’d stick. One argument you regularly hear about the filibuster is that if Democrats can pass things with 51 Senate votes, the Republicans can just un-pass them with 51 the next time they control the Senate. True enough. They could. But I say let ’em try.
Let them try to repeal an $18 minimum wage, a law that would be instantly popular. They couldn’t repeal Obamacare in about 70 tries, and it wasn’t nearly as popular as a higher minimum wage would be. The Republicans would not succeed at repealing most of what I listed above. Or, if they did succeed, they’d get strafed at the polls in the next election.
Nuking the filibuster would also, contrary to what nearly everyone says, increase bipartisanship. Here’s why. If Senate Republicans know that Democrats can pass things with a simple majority of 51, some of them—not many, but some—will think to themselves, Well, if this going to become law anyway, I might as well try to get my fingerprints on it; get an amendment in there that helps my state or makes the law slightly more palatable. With the threshold at 60, the incentive to seek compromise is zero, because no Republican wants to be that 60th vote that helps a liberal piece of legislation pass. But if they know it’s going to pass anyway with 51, a few will play ball. And they, not the hard-liners, will be the Republicans with leverage and power in a no-filibuster Senate.
So all that is why, even though I’d hate to see the SAVE America Act pass this year, I’d also see a huge silver lining. By killing the filibuster, Thune would be setting the table for many future important and usually irreversible liberal legislative victories.
And on top of that, he’d be doing the Democrats’ dirty work for them, because here’s another grim reality of filibuster politics: The Democrats don’t have the guts to kill it. I don’t care if they had 62 senators. The most they’re willing to do is soften it—move the threshold down to 54, say. That’s a typical Democratic half-measure. The filibuster is one issue on which Trump’s bull-in-china-shop posture is what America needs.
Trump is too dumb to know all this. I suspect Thune does, which is why he’s holding the line. And I guess, for the sake of the 2026 and 2028 elections, we should be glad that he does. But just remember: If he caves, all is not lost in the long run.
