With the midterm elections nearing, President Donald Trump is renewing pressure on Senate Republicans to get rid of the filibuster.
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“John Thune should not allow the United States Senate to ‘leave town’ until it passes The Save America Act,” Trump wrote on social media Monday, referring to his voting restrictions bill, “or, far better still, TERMINATES THE FILIBUSTER, where Republicans can then quickly pass everything they ever dreamed of.”
It was only a few years ago that Democrats were in control of the Senate and seriously considering getting rid of the filibuster. Some experts think it’s only a matter of time before this centuries-old Senate procedure intended to delay or prevent a vote on legislation ends.
Here’s what’s going on.
The filibuster allows the minority party to block legislation in the Senate. Its existence is a central difference between the House and the Senate. In the House, whichever party has the majority can pass pretty much whatever it wants with a majority vote. In the Senate, lawmakers have to find common ground, because most legislation requires 60 votes to advance, and rarely does one party have 60 out of 100 senators.
Right now, Republicans have 53 votes. That’s not close to what they’d need to pass Trump’s controversial Save America Act, which would mandate strict ID laws for voting and proof of citizenship to register to vote or after a name change. All Democrats oppose this legislation. So even though it passed the Republican-controlled House, it’s stuck in the Republican-controlled Senate because of the filibuster.
Legislation is the last big area of Senate business to which the filibuster applies. It used to apply to judicial and political nominations, but Democrats voted to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominations except for Supreme Court justices more than a decade ago, and Republicans eliminated the filibuster for Supreme Court justices a few years later.
Former president Joe Biden was a big supporter of the filibuster until he became president. He called for suspending the filibuster to let Democrats pass nationwide abortion protections and legislation that Democrats said would protect people’s voting rights in the wake of Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss.
“This is one of those defining moments,” Biden said of voting rights and getting rid of the filibuster. “It really is. People are going to be judged where were they before and where they after the vote.”
Changing filibuster rules requires a majority vote. Democrats came two votes short of being able to do that, with then-Sens. Joe Manchin III (West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona) voting against. “The filibuster is the only thing that prevents us from total insanity,” Manchin said at the time.
Republicans don’t have the votes for it, either. “It’s just a reality,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) said earlier this year.
The allure of getting rid of the filibuster for the majority is obvious: You can pass whatever your party agrees on and disregard the other side.
There’s also an argument that the filibuster is a blockade to good governance and even separation of powers. It was used in the 1960s to block civil rights legislation and more recently to block raising the debt ceiling, risking a recession.
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“In practice,” conservative commentator George F. Will argued in The Washington Post earlier this year, “the filibuster has prevented healthy politics. … Into this void has flowed presidential power.”
But the appeal of the filibuster is immediately clear to the senators in the minority: It can be the only way to stop proposals they vehemently oppose from becoming law.
“Republicans could fundamentally change the entire government and country with a simple majority vote,” Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania) wrote in The Post this week. He said he was wrong to support getting rid of the filibuster when Biden was in power and Democrats had control of Congress. “The one thing that has stopped many unpopular policies since the beginning of 2025 isn’t the Democrats — it is the filibuster.”
Some argue it promotes compromise. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-South Dakota) strongly opposes getting rid of the filibuster. “The filibuster is a big, fancy Washington word,” he said several years ago, “but it really just refers to a historic Senate rule that leads to more bipartisanship and consensus when making federal laws.”
Some Senate Republicans have proposed keeping it but forcing the minority to go back to old-school rules: actually holding the Senate floor with nonstop talking.
Democrats had the idea to lower the threshold for advancing legislation from 60 votes to 55. There’s precedent for that: Decades ago, the threshold was 67 votes, until it was changed in the 1970s.
Another idea is to eliminate the filibuster at certain times, like for a few months at the start of a new Congress.
But it may be only a matter of time before the Senate gets rid of the filibuster for legislation, Sarah Binder, a parliamentary expert with the Brookings Institution, said when Democrats were considering this a few years ago.
She noted that the Senate hasn’t looked back from eliminating the filibuster for presidential appointments. “It’s hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube,” she said.
Amber Phillips writes The 5-Minute Fix newsletter, a quick analysis of the day’s biggest political news. Send her an email here, or ask a question that could be featured in an upcoming newsletter.
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