This morning, Punchbowl has an item about Republican senators pledging not to tamper with the filibuster if they win control of Congress and Trump wins the presidency in November. (Yes, unfortunately we have to discuss these things.) Democrats don’t believe them. But Republicans insist they’ll say no to Donald Trump if he demands it. And they can point to 2017 and 2018 when he made those same demands and they refused.
Let me start by noting that Democrats absolutely shouldn’t believe them. Trump is Trump, after all, and Republican senators are Republican senators. But with that said, it is worth reminding ourselves that quite apart from believing Republican pledges or thinking Republicans are invested in values other than power, Republicans actually have interests in the filibuster that Democrats do not.
The first, and I would argue less important factor, is that Republicans have a party leader who many of them both do not trust (whatever they say publicly) and who supports various policies they do not. So the filibuster is convenient, in that it gives at least some of them an institutional or procedural backstop to resist Trump’s demands without precisely saying they’re resisting.
I say this is the less important factor because we’ve seen how many times Trump makes demands and Republicans fall in line.
But the much bigger reason is one that has nothing to do with Donald Trump at all. The modern filibuster didn’t emerge through some random, undirected process but has largely been the creation of the early 21st century GOP, though Democrats have also used it and benefited from it. As a minoritarian political party, the GOP is far more interested in stymieing legislation than passing it. What was the last big law or program Republicans wanted to pass but were blocked on because of the filibuster? The example which comes to mind for many is the late John McCain nixing Obamacare repeal with that now iconic thumbs down gesture. That defeat actually didn’t involve the filibuster. It came on a straight majority vote because it used budget reconciliation. But it still illustrates a broader point. The big legislative battle Republicans came up short on wasn’t really new legislation but rather repealing something Democrats had passed.
Republicans simply don’t have a big positive (in the narrow sense of the term) legislative agenda. They’re a status quo, minoritarian party. They want to block things. Their real focus is on tax cuts and judicial appointments. And, helpfully, the filibuster doesn’t apply to either of those because of budget reconciliation and the judicial confirmation carve-out. It’s no big mystery why Republicans support the filibuster. It doesn’t require any commitment to principle over interest to explain it. If you review Project 2025 — the second Trump term blueprint, which rightly horrifies Democrats and all upstanding Americans — what’s remarkable is how little legislation it envisions. It is overwhelmingly focused on executive orders and the conduct of executive power.
Simply stated, the filibuster works for the GOP — out of power and in power as well. It blocks their political opponents on numerous fronts and hardly impacts them at all.
There’s even an additional factor that grows out of this second one. I said that Republicans are a minoritarian party and have little positive legislative agenda. That last point — the lack of a legislative agenda — is true. But it has a twist to it. There is a legislative agenda. It’s just one that tends to be pretty unpopular. Again, minority party — not hugely surprising. A big chunk of Republicans would love to see a national abortion ban, for instance. But most elected Republicans realize that that would be electoral suicide. The filibuster provides a helpful backstop that allows Republicans not to deliver on something that the base of their party really wants. Democrats would like their version of this too — a national Roe law. But it would have clear majority support. So there’s little downside. The issue is the filibuster. As noted, the filibuster operates on each party very differently.
I’m not saying that Senate Republicans will stand up to Trump and deny him, necessarily. If he truly insisted, I’m pretty sure they’d cave. He might do it for a big Great Replacement-style immigration bill. But that might be hard for him to pull off even on a simple majority standard. What seems more likely to me is that they’ll take him aside, explain why it’s unnecessary and probably a loser for him and then he’ll drop it. In any case, my point here isn’t to predict the future. It’s to note that we can’t really understand the whole question of what Trump would demand or how Republicans would respond without appreciating that the filibuster works for Republicans and actually probably works for Trump too.