President Trump was given a mandate in the 2024 presidential election based on his bold, America First Agenda (AFA) and a widespread rejection of the Biden Administration's hard-left policies. America's majoritarian form of government, a constitutional republic, has been dammed by Senate tradition and rules.
Much of the AFA has made it through the House but has been halted in the Senate. America's very notion of governance has always been that the majority is to lead. By requiring 60 votes, a supermajority of senators, to move a piece of legislation, the Senate has scuttled America's will, its electoral outcomes.
This is all too familiar to me, as I was elected in 2016 and came to office in January 2017 just like President Trump. By the end of August of that year, I knew that President Trump's agenda was being submarined by his supposed allies in the U.S. House and Senate. I wrote in The Wall Street Journal that year:
"The greatest obstacle blocking Republicans from fulfilling our agenda is not manufactured outrage about Russians. It's the Senate filibuster, the 60-vote threshold to suspend debate that prevents most bills from making it to the floor…President Trump has now joined the chorus of filibuster critics as he watches his agenda languish. Republicans should consign the 60-vote rule to history—or risk throwing away their agenda along with their congressional majority."
We are seeing a replay of 2017, which unfortunately, may lead to a replay of 2018. That will be devastating to the America First Agenda and President Trump's policy ambitions.
As in 2017, like me, the president has grown frustrated watching the inertia in the Senate. And, as in 2017, the Senate's stasis has led to the president's calls to end the filibuster. He wants the Senate to become what it was for the first 125 years of this nation.
There are really two elements that must be apprehended to understand the byzantine rules of the United States Senate. First, the Senate allows for a speaking filibuster, which allows unlimited debate. This may result in a minority of the body controlling the floor for as long as a few senators can keep their speeches and debates going. Until 1917, there wasn't a process to close down that debate until the speakers tired and quit speaking.
The second element is cloture. Cloture is a mechanism to stop the debate, the filibuster, by a vote of a supermajority of the Senate. In Woodrow Wilson's time, it took two-thirds of the body to "close the filibuster." In 1975, it became obvious that the two-thirds standard was too difficult to obtain, so the Senate adopted a 60-vote Cloture Rule. And now it is obvious that even the 60-vote rule is too much.
Before the Woodrow Wilson Cloture Rule, if a senator—or group of senators—wished to delay, draw public attention, or soften up support for a bill, those senators would take over the floor and speak and debate as long as they could. Sometimes the exposure resulting from the speaking filibuster caused the bill to be pulled or defeated.
It was the attacks on his agenda by the filibuster that inspired President Woodrow Wilson to demand that his Senate allies create the first Cloture Rule. Today, the problem isn't the speaking filibuster, but the Cloture Rule. The Cloture Rule has become a sword, not a shield. It gives control to the minority who can effectively block every piece of legislation.
That means the bills that arrive in the Senate from the House can be doomed by a minority of the Senate, even if the bills are on the president's wish list.
This is especially true when the margin in the Senate is so narrow that neither political party has enough votes without going to the minority party, like now or even under Biden.
The recent government shutdown is a neon-lit example of Democrats withholding votes knowing that, in order to fund the federal government through passage of the Continuing Resolution (CR), the Senate would require at least eight Democrats to vote with Republicans. In other words, even though the majority of Republicans, with a couple of Democrats, voted to open the government, the Democrat minority was able to prevent passage of the CR, keeping the government closed for more than a month.
Some people tell me that the Cloture Rule forces the majority to engage with the minority, but the Democrats made clear that they would not join to end the filibuster until they got their way, which included increasing spending by $1.5 trillion.
Democrats have promised to do away with the 60-vote Cloture Rule should they get the majority in the Senate. They would have done so several years ago except two Democrats (Arizona's Sinema and West Virginia's Manchin) refused to go along. But those two reasonable voices are gone, and it is a foregone conclusion that a Democrat majority in the Senate will end the Cloture Rule.
President Trump, like so many of us, understands that our window of opportunity is very narrow. We must enact as much of the agenda as possible. Failure to do so will result in us losing the House in the midterms.
I urge my Senate colleagues to prudently return America to the majority rule and eliminate the Cloture Rule. To do so will allow us to spend the next year passing the agenda that we, and President Trump, were elected to enact. Failure to do so will not only thwart the execution of the agenda now, but it could lead to disastrous electoral consequences.