As the United States endures the longest government shutdown in its history, President Donald Trump has once again set his sights on the Senate filibuster, urging Republican lawmakers to eliminate the longstanding rule that requires a supermajority to advance most legislation. The president’s repeated calls—delivered in a flurry of Truth Social posts and a press conference on November 7 and 8, 2025—have ignited a fierce debate within the GOP, exposed deep divisions among Trump’s own supporters, and raised fundamental questions about the future of the Senate and American democracy itself.
Trump’s message has been blunt and relentless. “It is now time for the Republicans to play their ‘TRUMP CARD,’ and go for what is called the Nuclear Option — Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW!” he wrote last week, according to Newsweek. In his press conference, Trump doubled down, warning, “The Democrats will do this. So if the Democrats are going to do it, I’m saying Republicans should do it before they get a chance. It’s very simple.”
The stakes are high. With the Senate split 53-47 in favor of Republicans, Democrats have managed to keep the government shuttered by demanding an extension of health care subsidies that are set to expire at the end of 2025. If Republicans were to heed Trump’s call and scrap the filibuster, they could pass a continuing resolution—and a raft of conservative priorities—with a simple majority. Trump has not been shy about what he thinks could be accomplished: “Here’s some of the things that we’d pass if we terminated the filibuster: voter ID, no mail-in voting, no cash bail, no men in women’s sports, no welfare for illegals. You could go on and on,” he told reporters.
But the president’s vision of a filibuster-free Senate is far from universally shared within his own party. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican who began his tenure pledging to safeguard the filibuster, has been unequivocal. On November 8, Thune confirmed that there simply aren’t enough Republican votes to change the rules and scrap the legislative filibuster. In fact, a Washington Examiner poll found that 24 GOP senators, including Thune, are firmly opposed to eliminating the filibuster, emphasizing its role in fostering compromise and protecting minority rights in the Senate. Senator John Curtis of Utah echoed that sentiment, stating on X in late October that the rule “forces us to find common ground in the Senate.”
Still, the debate is far from settled. While a solid bloc of Republican senators is resisting Trump’s pressure, others are more open to reform, and a vocal minority—such as Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville—are pushing to end the filibuster immediately. “Anytime Republicans give an inch, Democrats take a mile. We cannot give in. It’s time we END THE FILIBUSTER,” Tuberville declared on X on November 7.
The filibuster, enshrined in Senate Rule XXII, has long been seen as a tool to encourage bipartisanship and prevent narrow majorities from steamrolling their agenda through the upper chamber. Catherine Fisk, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, explained to Newsweek that the rule’s history is complicated. “When the Senate has eliminated the filibuster in the past (e.g., on the confirmation of judges), it has done so by securing a majority to vote to change Rule XXII and then appealing the procedural objection about the vote to the Vice President, acting as presiding officer of the Senate, who rules that a majority vote is sufficient to change Rule XXII.”
Past moves to weaken the filibuster have been contentious and consequential. In 2013, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, invoked the “nuclear option” to eliminate the filibuster for all nominations except for Supreme Court justices. Republicans responded in kind in 2017, removing it for Supreme Court nominees and confirming Neil Gorsuch to the bench. Democrats, for their part, came close to abolishing the legislative filibuster when they controlled Washington four years ago, but a handful of senators balked at the prospect, warning that it could backfire when the balance of power inevitably shifted.
That’s the heart of the argument for caution. As Fisk put it, if Republicans vote to end the legislative filibuster, it "will be a step toward making the Senate more majoritarian.” She noted, “In the current political climate, the GOP benefits from nonmajoritarian rules because Democrats outnumber Republicans, and small states are benefitted by the structure of the Senate. But if Democrats get a majority in the Senate, and the House, and the White House, it will enhance their power.”
Grant Davis Reeher, a political science professor at Syracuse University, sees the resistance from Republican leaders as a sign that institutional guardrails are holding—for now. “The fact that Republican Senate leaders have made it clear that they are not interested in making that change is what causes me to say this,” Reeher told Newsweek. He argued that Trump’s push is “playing with fire.” If Republicans eliminate the filibuster, he warned, “it is hard to imagine that Democrats would re-institute it when they retake the Senate (which will happen one day).” The result, he said, would be a cycle of legislative whiplash—each party, upon gaining a slim majority, enacting and then repealing sweeping policies, leaving the country in a state of perpetual political upheaval.
Reeher also pointed out the paradox of the filibuster’s role in American democracy: “Although the filibuster is ‘undemocratic on its face—you need to get a supermajority of 60 in order to have a vote—given that we have the system of separated political institutions that we do, our political process depends on some level of cooperation and compromise.” He added, “It’s frequently not pretty and it can lead to deadlock as it has here, but eliminating it is not going to fix the broader political problems we’re dealing with at the moment. Rather, it would create big lurches and back and forth between more extreme policy changes that are constantly cancelling each other out, depending on who is in power at the moment.”
Costas Panagopoulos, a political science professor at Northeastern University, agreed, warning that abolishing the filibuster could harm Republicans at the ballot box. “Most importantly, it could shoot the GOP in the foot in the future when the party is no longer in the majority.” He added that such a move “could also calcify the perception that Trump and congressional Republicans are willing to dismantle American institutions designed to protect minority rights in order to steamroll their agenda through Congress. It may be viewed as overstepping and can potentially exact a price at the polls from voters who value institutions that promote compromise and cooperation more so than partisan interests.”
The president, undeterred, has insisted that eliminating the filibuster is the only way to break the current deadlock and secure a string of policy victories. “If we do it, we will never lose the midterms and we will never lose the general election, because we will have produced so many different things for our people, for the people, for the country, that it would be impossible to lose an election,” Trump predicted. But for now, with Senate Republicans standing firm and the shutdown grinding on, the filibuster—and the Senate’s tradition of requiring compromise—remains intact.
How long that will last, and at what cost, is a question that looms large over Washington as the nation waits for a resolution to the shutdown and wonders what the next chapter in this high-stakes political drama will bring.
