Being one of the right’s foremost postliberals, Bannon probably didn’t mean to imply that congressional servility toward Donald Trump is un-American. But he did, and it is. I sense a note of vestigial patriotic disgust in his Duma analogy, in fact: Despite preferring Putinism to liberalism, he can’t help but deride a body of time-serving cowards who’ll rubber-stamp virtually anything a depraved strongman puts in front of them. Not even fascists respect the Duma.
Bannon’s analogy has a flaw, though. Congress has betrayed its constitutional remit almost, yet not quite, completely. Specifically: There’s no such thing as a government shutdown in Putin’s Russia, I’m pretty sure.
It’s odd to mock America’s legislature for subservience toward the executive at the very moment that legislature has forced many executive agencies to stop functioning. Congressional Republicans may be willing to function like a Duma for Czar Donald, but congressional Democrats are not, and in an America where the Senate filibuster still exists, that means Congress as an institution will still—very occasionally—defy the president’s wishes.
Which raises an obvious question. Why don’t Senate Republicans eliminate the filibuster?
An anachronism.
The filibuster is an increasingly bizarre anachronism in an era when Congress lets the president declare wars unilaterally and criminally investigate his political enemies. Tolerating daily Watergate-style abuses designed to demolish the constitutional order are one thing, it seems, but asking Senate Majority Leader John Thune and his conference to end the 60-vote rule for cloture on legislation? Why, now you’ve gone too far.
You may recall that Trump did ask Senate Republicans during his first term to ditch the filibuster but gave up on it quickly, stonewalled by then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. That’s because power in the party was a bit more equally distributed then than it is now. The president hadn’t yet attained Putin-esque authority over the right and lacked a critical mass of populist henchmen around him willing to facilitate ecstatic norm-busting. And McConnell was a formidable figure in his own right, having led the Senate GOP for more than a decade by that point and notched some tectonic victories in the process.
2025 is different. Trump has the authority and the personnel muscle he needs to smash practically any norm he likes. And Thune isn’t what anyone would call formidable: In fact, at the president’s behest, he’s already chipped off another piece of the filibuster with respect to executive nominees. Why not go the rest of the way and end it for legislation, too, allowing Republicans to reopen the government over the other party’s objections?
Democrats made us do this, they could say. We can’t let the American people suffer under an endless shutdown. Plenty of voters would applaud.
Yet no one in Republican leadership seems enthused about filibuster-nuking.
Thune sure isn’t. House Speaker Mike Johnson sounds averse to it as well. And, curiously, Trump isn’t leaning hard on Senate Republicans to change their minds. Maybe that’s because he already gets to do most of what he wants to do via executive diktat and sees political value in preserving a simulacrum of checks and balances. Or maybe it’s a function of narcissism: Why would he want to share credit with the likes of John Thune for paying America’s soldiers when he can have all the glory for himself?
We don’t need to overthink it, though. A political project bent on making Americans comfortable with being ruled by a Caesar shouldn’t want Congress to function. The longer it’s paralyzed, the more compelling the logic of autocracy becomes. The filibuster’s persistence arguably makes the case for Putinism easier. Go figure that Trump isn’t as keen to end it now, with his authoritarian program in full flower, as he was in the more genteel civic era of 2018.
The case for going nuclear.
The Republican case for ending the filibuster begins with an elementary point about American civics: Policies enacted by statute are much harder to undo than executive orders.
You would think a guy who was president once before would understand that and care. Trump watched Joe Biden reverse many of his immigration policies with a few pen strokes; his current agenda, which is vastly more ambitious than that of his first term, is plainly designed to make postliberalism a permanent feature of American government (and culture).
So why aren’t Republicans doing the obvious thing to codify that agenda and maximize its odds of enduring? End the filibuster and start putting Trumpism on the books officially.
It’s not just about permanence, though. Many dubious Trump executive actions would stand a better chance in court against constitutional challenges if Congress ratified those actions with legislation. “When the president acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress, his authority is at its maximum, for it includes all that he possesses in his own right plus all that Congress can delegate,” Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson famously explained. Whereas “when the president acts in absence of either a congressional grant or denial of authority, he can only rely upon his own independent powers.”
I can’t guarantee that a law passed by Congress to end birthright citizenship would be upheld as consistent with the 14th Amendment. I can guarantee that it would stand a hell of a lot better chance than the executive order to that effect that Trump signed on his first day in office. Republicans are weakening their own hand legally by not going nuclear and lending Article I’s imprimatur to Article II’s policies.
For a party that controls the White House and Congress, there’s really no near-term downside to ending the legislative filibuster. The reasoning that’s kept both sides from ending it so far is long-term, theoretical, and obvious: Namely, turnabout is fair play. If Republicans nuke the filibuster now to move Trump’s agenda, it will stay nuked when Democrats eventually recapture control of the executive and legislative branches. Imagine what the left could enact if the threshold for passage in the Senate were (effectively) 51 votes, not 60.
Turnabout is fair play. Except that, to my pessimistic mind, that reasoning also feels increasingly anachronistic.
It’s clear, and becoming clearer by the day, that Republicans won’t voluntarily relinquish control of the presidency in 2028. You don’t need to suffer from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to believe that, you need only apply a degree of logic of which even a child should be capable: A messianic political movement that believes it’s saving America by weaponizing state power to persecute its enemies and privilege its own interests will not turn over that power to those enemies, whatever voters might say about it. It can’t risk doing so. It’s painted itself into a fascist corner in which the only way to protect itself from the monster it’s created is to refuse to move.
John Thune may not be a formidable politician, but he seems intelligent, so I take it he understands that. And if he does, the case for preserving the filibuster hangs by a thread: If America is doomed to right-wing autocracy in the near future, it doesn’t matter a whit how a future Democratic Senate majority might operate. The 51-vote threshold won’t do much to help Chuck Schumer work his will on God-emperor J.D. Vance in 2029. So Republicans might as well go nuclear now and enact whatever they wish, legitimizing the Trumpist program.
If Thune is reluctant to act, it must be because he remains in denial about his party’s willingness and ability to pull off a coup despite the near-miss of 2021 and the fact that the government now, unlike then, is staffed with slavish MAGA goblins. Either that or he’s willfully deceiving Americans to encourage complacency about the GOP’s intentions: Surely there’s no reason to worry about the future of U.S. elections if Senate Republicans are acting like Democrats might control the presidency someday soon, right?
Democrats will go nuclear.
If that’s too dystopian for you, though, here’s a more prosaic reason for Republicans to roll the dice on nuking the filibuster. Even if the next few rounds of elections go off without a hitch, it should be a while before Democrats have another Senate majority.
They had a tough Senate map in 2024. They have another tough one in 2026, needing to flip four seats when only two of the 22 races featuring Republican incumbents are toss-ups. Anything is possible if the economy deteriorates, but the president continues to poll respectably despite the whole “remorseless fascist takeover” thing. A blue wave looks unlikely.
And if the blue wave does arrive, Republicans will still enjoy an executive veto over Democratic legislation passed under a new 51-vote threshold until 2029—and perhaps much longer. As residents leave blue strongholds like California and New York for red ones like Texas and Florida, the Democrats’ odds of regaining the White House after 2030 are shrinking. Controlling a filibuster-less Senate won’t help the left if the right retains a vise grip on the presidency thanks to Republican states gaining electoral votes as their populations grow.
If we knew for a fact that the Democratic Party wouldn’t have a so-called “trifecta” in the federal government again until, say, 2032, wouldn’t it be worth it to Republicans to go nuclear now and start enacting their legislative program? Remember, as we’re seeing in the fight over COVID-era Obamacare subsidies, Americans tend to warm up to policies once they’ve lived with them for a while. The sooner the right “locks in” its program, the more time voters will have to get used to it before Democrats get a crack at repeal.
But if you’re still skeptical about the case for ending the filibuster after all that, here’s one more irresistible argument in favor of doing so. Whatever Republicans do or don’t do now, Democrats are almost certainly going nuclear the next time they have a trifecta.
They almost did the last time they had one, remember. If not for Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, both moderates and both now retired, the legislative filibuster might already have been scrapped. An optimist may reason that the next Democratic Senate majority will also be built on the backs of moderates, as it’ll take presumably pro-filibuster centrist types to win in red-leaning swing states. I’m not so sure of that, though: The next three years of Trumpist power grabs will radicalize a lot of liberals toward undoing the president’s abuses. And that undoing will necessarily require ending Senate Republicans’ ability to obstruct legislative business.
For instance, it’s a cinch that the next Democratic-dominated federal government will treat reforming Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a top priority. No more masked officers, no more pepper-ball potshots at pastors, no more “Alligator Alcatraz”: The agency will need to be overhauled significantly, if not rebuilt. That won’t happen as long as the legislative filibuster exists; if there’s any Trumpist innovation that Senate Republicans will go to the mat to preserve, it’s having an abusive paramilitary force in charge of immigration enforcement.
There won’t be 60 votes for reform. The filibuster will have to go, and it will. Determined to cleanse federal policy of fascist influence and exasperated by four years of authoritarian steamrolling, the left isn’t going to be guilt-tripped by Trump’s norm-smashing party into letting a norm like the filibuster restrict its ability to pass reforms.
On the contrary, if only as a matter of vengeance, many Democrats will want a government controlled by its party to move just as aggressively as Trump has. Let the right feel what it’s like when the party in charge starts knocking over procedural Chesterton fences to get its way. Having devoted so much rhetoric to condemning lawless executive power, though, liberals will want to run their revenge operation through the legislature: That means going nuclear in the Senate and ramming the Democratic agenda through Congress, ruthlessly but legally.
Either way, the filibuster is going bye-bye. If you’re John Thune, you might reflect on that and wonder why you shouldn’t move first.
The real reason.
I suspect he has reflected on it and concluded that he doesn’t want to move first even if Democrats are destined to go nuclear the next time they have a chance.
His reasoning has nothing to do with not wanting to set a procedural precedent that the left will exploit, I would bet. It has to do with his and his Republican colleagues’ distaste for Trumpism. Thune and the gang don’t want to end the filibuster because, once they do, they no longer have an excuse not to ratify garbage policies like tariffs imposed by executive whim or military attacks on fishing boats in the Caribbean.
Maybe it’s morally important to Senate Republicans to maintain an iota of distance between themselves and the president. So long as the filibuster exists, they get to keep their fingerprints off of most of his agenda. I don’t know how they sleep at night as they preside over the Duma-fication of their institution, but perhaps there’s solace for them psychologically in believing that as long as they’re prevented by the 60-vote threshold from rubber-stamping Trump’s abuses, they’re not truly culpable for them.
More likely, though, is that they appreciate the filibuster for shielding them from the wrath of the Republican base. In a Senate governed by simple majority, there’s nowhere to hide whenever the president rallies the right in favor of some sinister and/or lame-brained idea. So long as Democrats have a veto over legislation, Thune and the GOP can tell right-wing voters that their hands are tied. Take that veto away and suddenly the conference’s failure to, say, formally annex Greenland at Trump’s behest isn’t a matter of procedural roadblocks but a matter of cowardice, an unwillingness to “fight.” There’s no greater sin, politically or morally, to the modern American right.
The filibuster is a tiny fig leaf for tiny men to hide behind as the leader of their party sledgehammers a constitutional system they’ve spent their whole lives pretending to idolize. The ugly truth about Republican legislators is that they don’t want to be a Duma or a Congress, neither ceremonially validating an autocrat’s impulses nor holding him in check. They don’t want to do anything. They’ve checked out of the existential civic crisis they helped create and are desperate for ways to justify absenting themselves. Thanks to the filibuster, they have one.
