Republicans Are Quietly Strangling the Filibuster for Trump

In the background of the Senate Republican struggle to give Donald Trump his One Big Beautiful Bill, something historic is going on, aside from the largest social-safety-net cuts ever made. In several maneuvers surrounding the passage of this legislation, Republicans are quietly throttling the Senate filibuster, an unsavory tradition most of them have vowed to defend lest a future Democratic majority created by hundreds of millions of illegal-immigrant voters threatens to rob America of its priceless birthright of liberty and low marginal tax rates (according to MAGA rhetoric, at least).

Both parties have taken steps to weaken the filibuster (which allows 41 senators to block a measure they don’t like) in recent years: Democrats in 2013 changed the rules to allow confirmations of executive-branch appointees and non–Supreme Court federal judges by a simple majority vote, and in 2017 Republicans extended that exemption to Supreme Court confirmations.

But budget-reconciliation bills, which can be passed by a simple majority vote, are a giant exception from the filibuster (whenever single-party governing trifectas make them possible). So if the filibuster is to be preserved as an instrument of minority-party leverage and/or obstruction, the Senate must police the boundaries of what can and cannot be included in a reconciliation bill. The power to do so was given by the original Congressional Budget Act to the Senate parliamentarian, a nonpartisan appointed referee charged with applying rules that limit these bills to provisions principally designed to adjust spending or revenues, not policy matters. The parliamentarian’s process for scrubbing a budget bill to enforce this limitation is known informally as a “Byrd Bath,” named after longtime West Virginia senator Robert Byrd, who wrote these arcane rules back in the 1970s.

This year’s Byrd Bath for the Trump megabill, administered by longtime parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, has excluded quite a few significant provisions while forcing others to be rewritten to secure compliance (e.g., the SNAP cuts, which were modified but not dropped). This has deeply annoyed Republicans, particularly those in the White House, leading Trump to encourage an open rebellion, as The Hill reported:

In a Sunday post on Truth Social, the president backed a call from Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) and other GOP hard-liners to ignore rulings from Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough.

“Great Congressman Greg Steube is 100% correct. An unelected Senate Staffer (Parliamentarian), should not be allowed to hurt the Republicans Bill. Wants many fantastic things out. NO! DJT,” Trump wrote …

Hard-line conservatives were fuming following MacDonough’s decision Thursday to reject key Medicaid cuts in the Senate version of Trump’s major policy bill, and an increasing number of Republicans in both chambers have upped the pressure on their colleagues to challenge the referee’s ruling on the floor.

If they follow through on that advice, they may as well just declare the filibuster dead since henceforth whoever controls the Senate can put whatever they want into a budget-reconciliation bill. Trump, who has waged an on-again, off-again war on the filibuster over the years may be fine with that, but many Republicans in the Senate have refused to give up on every reactionary’s weapon of last resort.

But even if they decline to overrule MacDonough, Senate Republicans have already decisively weakened what’s left of the filibuster by sidestepping a parliamentarian’s ruling on an incredibly blatant violation of the rules in order to enact the megabill, as Politico explains:

Senate Republicans are on the cusp of formally adopting a controversial accounting tactic to zero out much of the cost of their massive domestic policy bill.

The matter came to a head on the Senate floor Sunday afternoon, when Democrats sought to prevent the use of the current policy baseline, as the tactic is known. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer objected to the maneuver and accused Republicans of setting a new precedent with the “budgetary gimmick.”

The idea, which Senate Republicans have been quietly promoting all year, is that extensions of existing tax cuts scheduled to expire in 2025 don’t actually cost anything because they don’t change tax rates. This “current policy baseline” gimmick is blatantly dishonest since it was Republicans who made the tax cuts in question temporary to get them included in a reconciliation bill in 2017; the costs ignored then have to be recognized now. But beyond that problem, this is absolutely the kind of shenanigans the Byrd Bath was designed to stop, and pretending the Senate Budget Committee chair can make such a decision guts the parliamentarian’s role and makes the filibuster rules optional.

It’s unclear which party will give a formal coup de grâce to the filibuster and make the Senate an institution that operates according to simple majorities just like the House. But this year’s Republican senators have gone a long way toward strangling, if not killing, the filibuster at Trump’s behest.