Trump urges GOP to bust filibuster
WASHINGTON — The weekend wrangling over how to end the second federal government shutdown in under five years — and the first ever to occur under single-party control of the White House and both houses of Congress — raised a thorny issue: the fate of the Senate filibuster.
“If stalemate continues, Republicans should go to 51% (Nuclear Option) and vote on real, long term budget, no C.R.’s!” President Trump tweeted yesterday. It’s not the first time the president has urged the Senate to change its rules to pass legislation by a simple majority vote instead of the current 60-vote threshold.
For Trump, of course, the idea is all about winning: What good is it to have single-party control of the executive and legislative branches if he can’t get exactly what he wants, when he wants it?
But the Senate filibuster is not just some quirk of government bureaucracy. It was created more than 200 years ago to ensure that the minority party would at least have the opportunity to be heard, and to encourage both parties to work together and come to a consensus to better serve the American people.
Of course, in today’s increasingly acrimonious hyper-partisanship in Washington, it’s unclear how long the Senate filibuster can survive.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have been chipping away at it for years. Over the objection of many in his own party, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Democrat from Nevada, used the socalled “nuclear option” to end a filibuster of President Barack Obama’s lower court judicial nominees in 2013.
That paved the way for current Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to nuke the filibuster for Supreme Court picks to install Justice Neil Gorsuch on the high court.
For now, there isn’t the appetite in the GOP Senate leadership, which controls that body with just 51 seats, to scuttle the rule for other legislative votes, including government spending bills.
After Trump’s tweet, McConnell said on the Senate floor yesterday that he supports “the right (to filibuster) from an institutional point of view.” Others agreed. “That would be the end of the Senate as it was originally devised and created going back to our founding fathers,” said Sen. Dick Rubin (D-Ill.) yesterday on ABC’s “This Week.”
Still, given the widening chasm between the parties in Washington, it’s hard to imagine the legislative filibuster is on firm ground as long as there are loud voices like the president’s calling for its end.