Trump is right about the filibuster

OPINION:

Even a broken clock, the saying goes, is right twice a day — and so it is with President Trump, a man wrong about many things yet possessed of a strange genius. He may not understand how tariffs work, but he recognizes dysfunction and sometimes stands alone in speaking an obvious truth. When he says the Senate should abolish the filibuster, he is right.

Republicans are at the moment rejecting Mr. Trump’s call last week to scrap the filibuster on principle, which the Senate can do, weirdly, with a simple majority vote. They fear that empowering themselves would also empower Democrats in the future. Interesting, but they are choosing the wrong issue for which to grow a spine.

The filibuster is an absurd relic that cripples U.S. governance and confuses everyone. The United States is almost alone among democracies in allowing a minority of legislators to routinely block the will of the majority. In most countries, if a government wins an election, it governs — unless it is trying to break the law, in which case courts might intervene. The majority passes a budget and enacts laws, and the opposition complains and plots its return to power. Only in America are 59 votes out of 100 not enough to pass a budget.

The filibuster isn’t even constitutional. The word appears nowhere in the founding documents. The framers deliberately required supermajorities for only a handful of extraordinary acts: ratifying treaties, overriding vetoes, amending the Constitution and convicting an impeached president. For everything else, they intended simple majority rule. The Senate’s current 60-vote requirement for “cloture” is an accident.

The story begins in 1806, when Vice President Aaron Burr, fresh from killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel, suggested simplifying the Senate rule book by dropping a provision called the “previous question” motion, which allowed a majority to end debate. The gentlemen senators of the day obliged. Only in 1837 did a group of Jacksonian loyalists discover that they could talk endlessly to block a measure.

In 1917, President Wilson, infuriated by a filibuster that obstructed U.S. preparations for World War I, demanded reform. The Senate responded with a rule allowing debate to end with a two-thirds vote. That was still a high bar, but at least it existed. In 1975, the threshold was lowered to three-fifths — 60 senators — and, more fatefully, a “two-track” system was introduced so that filibustered bills could be set aside while the chamber moved on. The old theatrical “talking filibuster” faded away. Now, all a senator needed to do was threaten a filibuster, and the majority was presumed powerless.

The result is the paralysis we know today. Legislation on guns, immigration, voting rights, climate and nearly everything else dies not because it lacks majority support but because it lacks a supermajority. The Senate, conceived as the sober house of deliberation, has become the chamber of obstruction.

Here we are, in 2025, with the federal government partly shut down, not because there is any serious disagreement about keeping the lights on but because the world’s oldest democracy insists on a rule that isn’t even in its constitution. Sixty out of 100 senators must agree to proceed before anything gets done. It’s ridiculous.

Mr. Trump’s legislative agenda is largely a parade of cruel absurdities, but when he senses the stupidity of all this, he is right. He wants the filibuster gone so his party can ram through its “big, beautiful” bills — tax cuts for billionaires, restrictions on abortion, a wall or two.

The filibuster serves no noble end. It’s not a check on tyranny; it’s a license for minority veto. If the American people don’t want the Republicans to eviscerate their entitlements, take over their cities and gut the federal government, they should vote them out of office.

Democrats fear what Republicans would do with unchecked power, and they have reason. A Republican Party freed from the filibuster could roll back environmental rules, slash social programs and assault reproductive rights. However, the answer to bad laws is not paralysis but rather elections.

Besides, the filibuster has already been weakened. In 2013, Democrats used the “nuclear option” to eliminate it for executive appointments and lower-court judges after Republicans blocked dozens of Obama nominees. In 2017, Republicans extended that to Supreme Court picks. Most tax and spending bills already bypass the rule under “budget reconciliation.” What remains is a shrinking island of gridlock.

What’s left of this procedure breeds cynicism and, by preventing the worst excess, allows Americans to think that unwise choices have no consequence. Minority parties now have every incentive to block everything and then campaign on the government’s failures. Meanwhile, the majority hides behind the rule to avoid difficult votes. Both sides get to posture; nothing gets done.

Compare this with how the rest of the democratic world operates. In Britain, the government proposes a budget and passes it with a simple majority; if it loses, the government falls. In Canada, the same. In Germany, France, Israel, Japan — everywhere — the majority rules and then faces the voters. Only the U.S. Senate persists with a rule that says 59 votes count for nothing. It’s governance by ghost, ritual masquerading as principle.

By the way, the rest of the world, by and large, also requires IDs to vote. Mr. Trump — and it pains me to write this — was right about that as well.

Eliminating the filibuster would not make America an autocracy but rather make it normal. The country’s other great singularities — the Electoral College, the debt ceiling, lifetime judicial appointments — are also historical accidents elevated to sacred cows. Each contributes to dysfunction and minority rule. Much of this American “exceptionalism,” such as electing sheriffs and rejecting the metric system, is just foolish.

The filibuster is simply the most conspicuous of the bunch: an invented obstacle defended mostly by those who imagine they will need it later.

The Founders’ genius lay in checks and balances among the branches, not inside them. The Senate already overrepresents small states, giving Wyoming and Vermont the same weight as California and Texas. To layer a supermajority rule on top of that is madness. So yes, Mr. Trump’s motives may be the worst, his timing self-serving and his rhetoric toxic, but on this, he happens to be correct. America should rid itself of the filibuster once and for all.

• Dan Perry is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of The Associated Press, a former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem and the author of two books. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.