Trump’s Shutdown Move: End the Filibuster?

Trump urges the GOP to end filibuster, to break the shutdown. According to the Times, President Trump late on Thursday night pressed Senate Republicans to play their trump card and scrap the filibuster to end the federal government Shutdown. Republicans have 53 seats in the Senate, but most bills need 60 votes. Democrats are blocking funding that omits reinstating expiring Affordable Care act subsidies. GOP leaders like John Thune have warned changing the rule could backfire under a future Democratic majority. The demand comes as anti poverty programs face lapses and ACA shoppers brace for higher prices. Quick explainer here. The filibuster isn't in the Constitution. It's just a rule senators made. For most of US History, a filibuster meant you had to hold the floor. You had to literally stand up and, and speak and actually debate until a super majority voted to cut it off. So that's what a lot of people think of, you know, the old Jimmy Stewart movie where he, Mr. Smith goes to Washington where he's speaking on and on and on to make his point and to prevent a vote from happening. And we don't have to do that anymore. In the 1970s, the Senate adopted a two track system and in 1975 lowered cloture to 60 votes, meaning you had to have 60 votes in order for something to pass. That shift enabled today's so called silent filibust. A minority can simply signal an objection and leaders won't bring a bill to a vote unless it clears 60 votes. Critics call that undemocratic because a minority, often representing fewer voters, can veto majority supported legislation. And because it's just a rule, a simple majority can change it. So what's the real message here? Donald Trump is absolutely right to call for an end to the filibuster. He did win the popular election. Republicans did win the Senate and the House. If they really want to take 20 million people off of health care and get rid of food stamps, they've earned the votes to do it. So yes, it's perfectly fine to eliminate the filibuster. It's not written in the Constitution. Let's dig a little deeper here. Now, there are a lot of people who criticize Donald Trump and a lot of his moves over the last 10 months as being authoritarian, of being king, like of trampling the Constitution. This isn't one of those moves. It's actually more Democratic to say majority should rule. Now the reason the Senate does that is every single senator is thinking, well, I want to be in this body till I'm 100 years old, like Strom Thurmond. And there are going to be times when, when my party's going to be in minority, but I still want a whole lot of power. I still want a lot of lobbyists kissing up to me campaign contributions, even though my party's not in power. So the way they do that is by giving the minority party power and saying, okay, as long as you can get 41 votes on any issue, you can stop anything you want. So it's profoundly undemocratic. Are there certain virtues to it? Yes. If the filibuster is eliminated today, are there going to be times in the future where legislation is passed that I think is horrible, that could have been stopped from a filibuster and it didn't? Yeah, those are the bricks. So, as I told you before, I'm a sane, sensible centrist. I call it like it is. I'm not here to carry water necessarily for any one party. And in this case, Trump is in the right. He has an agenda. He wants to do what he wants to do. Like it or not, he did win not just the electoral vote as he did in 2016, but he won the popular vote. People on his team won a clear cut majority of the Senate, 53 senators to 46 for Democrats, 47 caucusing with the Democratic Party. So they should have the right to pass legislation as they want. Here's the real lesson I think that Democrats need to learn, which is actions have consequences. Inactions have consequences. There were tens of millions of registered voters who are Democratically leaning who couldn't have been bothered to vote in 2024. And many of them now are going to see their health insurance double. Many of them are on SNAP food stamps and are not going to have any food next week. Well, I'm sorry, I don't mean to be callous, but actions have consequences. Inactions have. If you say, oh, I don't want to wait in line, I'm not going to vote today, now you get you're getting the result of that. And we can go about demographic by demographic. This administration has been called out for seemingly wanting to really pick on black women, whether it's sicking the Department of Justice on them in the case of Letitia James, whether it is trying to sack the black woman on the Federal Reserve with trumped up charges of mortgage fraud. It seems like they're always after black women somehow. Well, guess what? There were millions of black women who didn't bother to vote in the election last year. I'm sorry. Actions have consequences. There are tens of millions of poor people in America who depend on government subsidies, who depend on food stamps, didn't bother to vote last year. Well, there are consequences and there's plenty of blame to go around. There were millions of voters in the 2016 election, for example, who thought Hillary was too conservative. She wasn't, Bernie. She wasn't far left enough. She wasn't far progressive enough. And you know what? A lot of them did, they sat on their hands and they allowed Trump to take power. The first, let's not forget, if Trump had lost the 2016 election in the elect, he did lose in the popular vote. If he had lost in the Electoral College as well as losing by millions of votes in, in the popular election, which he did, we would have never heard from him again. The Republican Party would have quickly turned and said, well, we tried that, that didn't work and they would have gone on to another candidate. But they didn't because he won. And the margin of victory with just really a few tens of thousands of votes, 2016 could have been completely altered by a lot of the so called liberals and progressives who said, oh, I'm not going to hold my nose and vote for a mainstream Democrat like Hillary. There's no difference between, I heard time and time again, there's no difference between Hillary and the Donald heard that repeatedly. Well, those people aren't saying that anymore. I think they realize there's a pretty big difference. So look, folks, I've spent a fair amount of time on this show and a lot of other shows have talked about the rise of authoritarianism, the destructions of basic democratic principles. This isn't one of them saying that voters have the right to select their members of Congress and their senators, and then those senators have the right to vote for or against certain legislation and it should be a majority rule. That is democracy. You could certainly argue, as many have, that the filibuster is inherently undemocratic. It gives power, excessive power to the minority. And I just don't know how you can, with once out of one side of your mouth, attack the current administration for being authoritarian and, and ripping the shreds of democracy. On the other hand, say, how dare they suggest we get rid of the filibuster. The Senate doesn't really want to do it because all of the senators, especially Republicans, are looking forward to the day when they don't have Donald Trump around. Trust they won't say it publicly, they're afraid of all the threats they'll get. But they're looking forward to that day. They also realize there's a day when they might not hold power in the majority, so they want to keep that filibuster. But if Trump tells them they got to do it, I think they will do it, which means the government can open back up, which is certainly good to all the government employees now who are trying to survive figuring out, how do I pay my rent, how do I buy groceries Right now I haven't been paid in more than a month. It will be good for at least some of the people who might get their food stamps in the SNAP program And for the 20 million Americans who are going to see your health care cost double again. Actions have consequences. If you didn't want that, you should have voted for a party that was committed to keeping the status quo on health care, not doubling, because let's give credit where credit is due. The Trump administration was pretty transparent in their campaign. And while they didn't hold it up and waive it, the Project 2025 laid this all out. Anyone who's paying attention would realize that the plan all along was to cut government spending for anyone who needs any kind of subsidy for anything, especially health care. And now the chickens have come home to roost. So if you don't like it, yeah, you can go have another King's Day parade if you want, if it makes you feel better. And I'm not opposed to those things. But at some level, you're going to have to vote. You're going to have to get out the vote. The problem with so many centrist in America and liberals and progressives and those on the left is they think, okay, something happened, I think is bad, I'm going to file a lawsuit or I'm going to depend on some kind of trick like a filibuster, where even though I can't maintain popular support and get the votes I want in terms of majority, there's going to be a back doorway. And also during elections, if candidate I don't like is running against another candidate who's with me 90% of the time but isn't 100%, I can just sit out and be pure. That's the kind of mindset that has the Democrats in deep, deep trouble right now.