Senate Republicans are girding for a demand by Donald Trump to undo the chamber’s filibuster traditions in order to advance his agenda if he returns to the White House.
They anticipate Trump, Republicans’ presumptive presidential nominee, will ratchet up pressure on GOP senators to weaken the current standard that requires 60 votes to advance most legislation if their party flips control of the White House and Senate this fall.
But any attempt to eject that rule would face staunch opposition from the vast majority of Senate Republicans, who in interviews ruled out doing away with the super-majority threshold in the event they regain the majority in November.
“The president’s doing his job by trying to remove every obstacle” to his agenda, said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), “and I’m doing my job to make sure that the Senate institution is preserved.”
Bloomberg Government spoke with about three dozen Republican senators and leading candidates for Senate for this story.
The Senate for decades has essentially required 60 votes — three-fifths of sitting senators — in order to limit debate on most legislation, though Congress over the years has developed exceptions to that rule.
Republicans themselves voted in 2017 to abolish the super-majority threshold necessary to end filibusters on Supreme Court nominees, following Democrats’ move to do so on lower-court judges in 2013 amid GOP opposition to then-President Barack Obama’s nominees. Statutory exemptions to the rule also exist for budget-related bills through reconciliation or to overturn federal regulations.
While Republicans have many pickup opportunities in the Senate, few if any anticipate they start January with the 60 votes needed to pass any bill on a party-line vote. The last time either party held such a majority was in 2009 and 2010, leading to Democrats’ enactment of the Obama-era health care law.
Even in a scenario where Republicans’ control both chambers of Congress and the White House, Senate Republicans are eager to maintain their veto power if they ever returned to the minority.
The cloture threshold “protects the rights of the minority,” said Sen. Joni Ernst (Iowa), a member of Republican leadership. “We are meant to be different than the House.”
Resist Temptation
“You just have to resist” the temptation to do away with the rule to advance a policy priority, Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said. “It’s instructive to talk about it before” Trump pressures senators to lower the threshold necessary to advance most legislation, he added.
Twenty-nine Republicans signed a letter in 2017 urging their leaders Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to keep the rules in place, including current Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) and other senior Republicans.
Thune and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), the two candidates to replace McConnell, have reiterated their support for current practice in recent weeks. So did Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), the only candidate to replace term-limited Thune as whip.
“I don’t see any justification for any rules changes at this point,” Cornyn said.
“I don’t know that we’re unanimous” in supporting the current rule, Thune said of Senate Republicans. “But it’s a strong, strong majority view” in favor of keeping the threshold.
Trump has voiced various views on the procedure depending on whether his party was in control of the chamber. In 2017 said “the very outdated filibuster rule must go” as his party was “wasting time” on a doomed effort to repeal Obama’s health insurance law. However, in 2021 when Republicans were in the minority, Trump said a successful Democratic effort to lower the threshold would be “catastrophic for the Republican Party.”
Half of the Republicans who signed the 2017 letter pledging support for the filibuster rule have since retired, lost re-election, or died.
At the same time, some leading candidates for Senate this year have committed to upholding the rule if they’re elected in November. They include Rep. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.), former Utah House Speaker Brad Wilson (R), Kari Lake (R) in Arizona, former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R).
“It’s been good for our country, and I would not want to be part of the group that eliminated it,” said Rep. John Curtis (R), who’s seeking an open Senate seat in Utah.
Republicans generally get more advantage from the filibuster rule than Democrats because they mostly want the government to do less. And much of what they want, from repealing recent regulations to cutting entitlement spending other than Social Security and confirming conservative Supreme Court justices, can already be accomplished with a simple majority under existing filibuster carveouts.
While McConnell has said he will never agree to end the 60-vote filibuster rule, even for abortion, some of his colleagues might be more tempted with a menu of conservative agenda items all but certain to face a Democratic blockade.
“Never say never,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). “The filibuster has meant different things over time.” Hawley added that “abolishing the filibuster is not on my priority list.”
Following elections increasingly hinged on border security and immigration policy, Republicans could seek to move some changes to those policies through budget reconciliation. But the Senate parliamentarian previously advised that immigration policy changes generally don’t qualify despite their ramifications on spending and taxes.
Republican filibuster supporters say there’s value in having the ability to stall and ultimately change legislation, especially at critical junctures of must-pass packages like expiring government funding.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) named just one scenario in which he would break tradition to allow standalone legislation to move with just a simple majority: “If it would save the world from nuclear Holocaust.”
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