Why Ending the Filibuster Won't End Gridlock
At a time of factional divides, a divisive and high-stakes bare-majoritarian regime will shift conflict from between the parties to within them.
Five years after progressives and technocrats on the left started calling for the abolition of the legislative filibuster in the federal Senate, President Donald Trump and a small number of congressional lawmakers are calling for the same. Though the idea is meeting stiff resistance among Senate Republicans, it’s a moment to confront some of the assumptions about axing the filibuster and governing via bare majoritarianism in such a tightly polarized union.
Chatter among the GOP about axing the filibuster first came up as last year’s shutdown stretched on. Now it’s come up again as Trump pushes Congress to pass the SAVE Act, a bill that, among other things, would require voters to provide a passport to vote in federal elections. Even so, filibuster abolition seems much more at home on the left—the side that has historically embraced centralized power. Though there remains a rift between technocrats and progressives, one thing that seems to unite them is a disdain for mediating institutions that impede centralized power.
The premise to end the filibuster rests on the idea that the majority should rule, and that if Americans don’t like the results—disruptive though they may be—voters can simply vote them out, and dare the winners to repeal their supposedly popular policies. Further, the idea is that ending the filibuster would prevent senators at the ideological center of the chamber from impeding glorious progress in the national interest. But what if that conventional wisdom is wrong? What if, as is so often the case in politics, the cause-effect link winds up not being straightforward? What if instead bare majoritarianism winds up shifting conflict inward from the center?
There hasn’t been a lot of good, well-worded polling on the filibuster generally or lately. An April 2021 Monmouth poll found the public divided 34%-34%, with 33% having no opinion. The same poll found 38% support to keep the filibuster, another 38% to keep it with reforms, and 19% to eliminate it entirely. A Morning Consult poll from October 2021 found 41%-27% support in favor of the filibuster. Phrased differently, the same poll found the public narrowly favoring, 43%-40%, a rule where a majority of 60 votes is required to pass legislation.
Historically, the filibuster wasn’t designed as a grand constitutional safeguard. It emerged accidentally from Senate procedure and culture. In the early Senate, debate was often constrained by the chamber’s own norms and by the expectation that senators would eventually yield to a vote. Over time, especially after the Senate removed a formal “previous question” motion in the early 1800s, the combination of unlimited debate and a small, clubby institution created the possibility of prolonged obstruction—but it wasn’t routinely exploited. For much of U.S. history, the Senate simply didn’t operate as a body where every major bill faced a 60-vote test. The tactic was used episodically, often at moments of high intensity, and it carried reputational costs. That changed most infamously when Southern senators used filibusters and other delaying tactics to defend Jim Crow and block civil-rights legislation.
Critics of the filibuster on the left will contend that it is used today in a way the Founders would have never intended, but, as those who wax on about the Founders are so often reminded by those on the left, times and circumstances change. Given the consolidation of power at the federal level of government and within the executive, for which most of the Founders did not intend, old rules can find new relevance when consolidation increases systemic risk.
The contemporary story—especially post-2000—is where things escalated. As polarization rose, the filibuster became normal operating procedure: a quiet expectation that major legislation requires 60 votes, because the minority can force the majority to burn time to get to a vote. But the real accelerant was the nuclear-option logic that turned Senate rules into a tit-for-tat arms race. Things escalated further when Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate majority leader from Nevada, detonated the supermajority threshold for most executive and lower-court nominations, setting off a domino effect that Republicans had little choice but to reciprocate. At the time Reid pulled the trigger, Senate Majority Leader warned him that he’d regret it. Republicans, in response, axed the filibuster for federal judges and U.S. Supreme Court justices, effectively clearing the way for three Republican appointees to join a majority-conservative U.S. Supreme Court—plus a record-number of appointees to the federal bench—only to be outdone by Joe Biden.
The federal Democratic trifecta of 2021-23 was really reflective of pent-up demand among liberals and a wave of venture capital-backed progressive news outlets to tackle economic and climate issues that developed during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Leveraging the COVID crisis to cram through bold action, originally to the tune of $7 trillion in new spending, is what seems to have put filibuster abolition on the table. The old “never let an emergency go to waste”.
And while there are risky ideas, including among centrist technocrats, to do things like outsource more authority over electrical transmission to FERC or strong-arm states and localities into urbanism, we seem to be in a different era—one that might still result in the filibuster’s demise but also see tempered policymaking, at least relative to the 2021-23 period. Why? Today, the national debt is starting to worry even those on the center-left. It’s become more acceptable within the mainstream to abandon climate apocalypticism for climate pragmatism by acknowledging the demand for fossil fuels. There’s wider recognition of the difficulty and tradeoffs of taxing wealth and unrealized capital gains, neglecting the U.S.-Mexico border, and transitioning to a European-style single-payer healthcare system at a time when Europe’s feebleness and dependency on the U.S. for its defense is in large part due to spending on its social welfare programs.
More to the point, even amid the pursuit of a more disruptive agenda, what seems more likely to occur in a federal Senate without a filibuster is the relocation, not the elimination, of conflict, from the center and inward within the caucuses themselves.
At least when it comes to higher-profile legislation, the filibuster frequently forces the coalitions within the parties to reach outward, at least occasionally, to find the marginal votes needed to close debate, otherwise known as cloture. Removing the 60-vote requirement to end cloture could shift the bargaining when disruptive policy comes up and induce wider rifts between party factions that, in themselves, wind up mediating policy.
When a party can say, “we don’t have 60,” it lowers the temperature inside the caucus. Uneasy members can hide behind the math. Maximalists can be told—without anyone taking personal blame—that the chamber’s rules won’t allow it. Disagreements still exist, but they’re easier to manage because the path is obviously narrow. Remove the filibuster and that disciplining constraint disappears. Suddenly the question is no longer “can we find ten votes somewhere?” but “can we keep every last one of us in line?” That would put pressure on many more senators to privately balk, bargain for concessions, or publicly defect when a bill clashes with their state’s interests. I suspect that when Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona took heat for holding up glorious progress in 2021-2023, they were also providing cover for other Democrats alarmed by filibuster abolition but who did not need to or want to say so out loud.
The dynamic of the 51-vote regime is that a threshold of 51 votes makes passing ambitious legislation numerically easier but strategically equally or more difficult. If one side is acting with urgency and expects the next election to flip control, it has an incentive to push bigger, more entrenching changes. The catch is that bigger change creates more room for dissent within a party caucus when members are no longer protected by the other side failing to play ball. That can raise internal temperature, harden factional lines, and turn ordinary ideological differences into loyalty tests that, in turn, place at risk incumbent senators in competitive races and create an opening for primary challenges or party losses to the minority party. The wager liberals are making is that Democrats will pass such popular policies that Republicans who return to power will be politically foolish to repeal them, as was the case with the Affordable Care Act. But the bigger and more structural the agenda gets, the more it strains a caucus stitched together by factions that have become more, not less, visible since 2010. The paradox is that eliminating a tool associated with gridlock can make gridlock more likely—by moving the fight from a visible, cross-party threshold to a series of internal standoffs where a handful of senators have even more reason to defect, delay, and demand more, even if it happens in private.
But the minority would still have constraints to impose without a filibuster. Though it may not block legislation, there’s an entire toolkit of proceduralism available to create friction for the majority party.
The Senate runs on consent and time. Much of what happens in any given week—scheduling, routine motions, expedited consideration, moving “noncontroversial” business—depends on unanimous-consent agreements. A determined minority can withhold that consent and force the chamber to do everything the hard way. That won’t always stop a bill, but it can make the process so slow and exhausting that leaders have to triage: which fights are worth days of floor time, and which are better postponed, watered down, or dropped.
The minority can also grind the gears through procedural objections, amendment floods, quorum tactics, repeated votes, and full readings—turning the floor into a sequence of delays designed to run out the clock. The majority may still prevail, but only by spending weeks on what could have taken hours.
And in the 24-hour news cycle, the minority can trade consent for votes on embarrassing amendments designed to split the majority or raise the cost of passage. Often the goal isn’t to kill the bill outright, but to make it painful enough that a few majority senators blink. None of this produces the clean majoritarian accountability abolitionists promise. The outcome is more like guerrilla warfare: governing that is more draining, more deadline-driven, and more reliant on maneuvers—creating stronger temptations to route around Congress altogether.
That last point matters because some self-styled realists argue that ending the filibuster would rebalance power away from an aggrandized presidency and bureaucracy and back toward Congress. This is an extraordinarily naive assumption.
Congress’s capacity constraints don’t vanish under bare majoritarianism. And if policy can swing every two or four years, lawmakers have more incentive to write broader statutes that delegate more detail to agencies, not less. Conflict then shifts from legislating to implementation—behind closed doors, through rulemaking and litigation—inviting more judicial review and more executive workarounds. The presidency remains the focal point of problem-solving whether the Senate needs 60 votes or 51. The executive will only get reined in by laws that explicitly restrain executive power, or by courts that do.
In a more extreme scenario, progressives and centrist Democrats could join forces not merely on sweeping health care, tax, or climate policy, but on institutional radicalism: adding new states to pack the Senate, expanding the Supreme Court, nationalizing voting rules, and placing federal power over redistricting. In combination, these moves could entrench Democratic power in ways Republicans have not been willing to entertain in Congress, given their thinner appetite for institutional upheaval beyond unilateral executive overreach that transcends presidents.
Ending the filibuster is sold as a way to make Washington finally “work.” But in a polarized, factional era, it’s more likely to change where dysfunction shows up than to eliminate it—replacing one chokepoint with dozens of smaller ones. If those, too, are eliminated over time, such an event becomes as strong a causal candidate for the union’s gradual dissolution as anything else that’s been surmised in the commentariat.
The filibuster may not be sacred. But neither is the fantasy that American politics operates in a straight line—or that bare majoritarianism is synonymous with wholesome democracy and clean governance.
