President Trump is still insisting that the Senate needs to get rid of the filibuster. Now, he has his Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, backing him up.

As our readers will remember, the president announced that he wanted the Senate to use the “nuclear option” to get rid of the filibuster during the shutdown. That didn’t happen, but President Trump has occasionally mentioned it since the government re-opened. But on Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent threw in with the president, writing in an op-ed published in the Washington Post that the filibuster needs to go, by highlighting the historical quirk of the filibuster’s very existence, and encouraging the Republicans to pull the proverbial trigger before the Democrats do so.

For generations, the filibuster has been romanticized as the Senate’s guardian of deliberation. In reality, it is a historical accident that has evolved into a standing veto for the minority and a license for paralysis. What once seemed like a dignified brake on hasty lawmaking now blocks even routine governance. It’s time for Republicans to acknowledge that the filibuster no longer serves the country — and to be prepared to end it.

The filibuster is not in the Constitution. The Framers envisioned debate, but they expected majority rule. The modern filibuster traces back to 1806, when the Senate, on the advice of then-former vice president Aaron Burr, deleted the “previous question” motion from its rulebook. That deletion wasn’t a philosophical embrace of unlimited debate; it was a housekeeping measure that inadvertently removed the chamber’s mechanism for cutting off debate by majority vote. Only later did senators discover they could exploit the gap to delay or block action.

In the modern era, merely threatening a filibuster typically forces a 60-vote supermajority to move legislation forward. Defenders of the filibuster argue that it ensures compromise, encourages bipartisanship and protects minority rights. That may have been true decades ago, but it is no longer the case now. Today, the minority party can abuse the filibuster to the point of rendering the Senate almost useless as a deliberative body.

Democrats themselves have recognized this phenomenon. That’s why, in 2013, Majority Leader Harry Reid eliminated the filibuster for presidential nominations other than Supreme Court justices. In 2017, Republicans followed suit for Supreme Court nominations. Each side justified its move as a response to unprecedented obstruction by the other. And each time, the Senate survived. The Republic did not fall. If anything, accountability improved because voters could finally see which party was governing and which was obstructing.

Though the filibuster no longer applies to judicial nominations, it still prevents the Senate from functioning as intended. Major legislation is now passed only through reconciliation, executive fiat or brinksmanship. The 60-vote threshold has become a convenient excuse for inaction. Both parties claim to defend “tradition.” But traditions are worth keeping only if they serve the country’s interests. The filibuster no longer does.

Some Republicans hesitate to end the filibuster out of fear that Democrats will one day use that same power against them. But Democrats will use that power against them whether Republicans end the filibuster or not. GOP senators who defend the filibuster are ignoring basic game theory. As the classic prisoner’s dilemma shows us, in a repeated game, the player who always cooperates while the opponent who always betrays is doomed to lose.

Bessent concluded the op-ed by reminding everyone that the current continuing resolution only extends to January 30th (though the “minibus” funding bills cover a full year, so those departments would no longer be affected by a shutdown, as their money is already appropriated and approved by Congress), and saying that if the Democrats decide to shut down the government again, then Republicans should nuke the filibuster and move forward. He later talked about his perspective during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

“It’s time for Republicans to acknowledge that the filibuster no longer serves the country — and to be prepared to end it,” he wrote in the piece, later telling Welker that it was meant “to put the Senate on notice.”

“The Democrats haven’t been able to stop President Trump in the courts. They haven’t been able to stop him in the media, so they had to harm the American people — 1.5% hit to GDP,” Bessent said, referencing the recent shutdown. “They don’t care. So I believe that Senate Democrats — if Senate Democrats close the government again, that Senate Republicans should immediately abrogate the filibuster.”

Now, as Ward Clark at RedState notes, Bessent’s argument is valid.

Secretary Bessent’s best argument, however, is one he is not alone in making. That is the fact that the Democrats have made no bones about getting rid of the filibuster, along with stacking the Supreme Court, mandating vote-by-mail, making the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico states, and a bunch of other dumb ideas into the bargain. They will do this the moment they are back in control of the Senate. And, sooner or later, they will be back in control.

Eliminating the filibuster will have bad consequences down the road. Of that there can be little doubt. Sooner or later, the Democrats will be back in control of the federal government, just as the GOP is now. It may be in 2029. It may be four years, eight years, or twenty years after that, but they will be back in control. At that time, the GOP will be helpless to effect legislative crackpottery, with the filibuster gone.

But when the Democrats are back in control, and sooner or later, they will be, they will eliminate the filibuster. That’s a certainty. How do we know? Because they keep telling us.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the Democrats, under Joe Biden, DID have control of the Senate, and they very nearly DID nuke the filibuster to get their way. The only reason they didn’t? Democrats (at the time) Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema refused, because they could see a future where the GOP had control of the Senate again, and heeded the warning that Mitch McConnell once gave Democrats when they started this process under the late Harry Reid.

But right now, Republicans have control, and the temptation to use the nuclear option and take the filibuster out is very much there. And President Trump yet again, on Truth Social, is pushing for it – even as he touts Republican “cohesion.”

Donald J. Trump Truth Social Post 05:55 PM EST 11/23/25 pic.twitter.com/l6aHHJqWC3

— Commentary Donald J. Trump Posts From Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) November 23, 2025

But instead of having Republicans pull the proverbial trigger first, why not take the bullets out of the gun altogether? Ben Shapiro proposed an idea to Ezra Klein during an interview back in September – which he credits to his friend and Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing – that the way to fix this is to propose a constitutional amendment to make the filibuster permanent.

A proposal that was made by my friend Jeremy Boreing that I think is actually quite smart: I happen to be a fan of the filibuster. I know Democrats right now are a fan of the filibuster because it’s useful to them. And presumably if they win the Senate back, they will no longer be fans of the filibuster.

I’m a fan of the filibuster because if you actually wish for there to be any form of slowing in the system or gridlock in the system — I’m a fan of gridlock in the system. I think gridlock is actually quite a good thing. I think that the American people should be told no an awful lot. That’s why the Constitution is very complex and designed specifically in order to create federal gridlock.

If you are a fan of the filibuster — I understand you’re not — what the Senate should do is a constitutional amendment to enshrine the filibuster.

I think that the attempt to do a convention of states in order to enshrine the principle that Congress is responsible for significantly more of our policy than the president — that would be a very good thing.

I think the thing that the founders didn’t game for — they figured ambition would check ambition. They didn’t figure that electoral ambition would check actual power ambition.

Now, President Trump and Secretary Bessent would absolutely hate the idea of making the filibuster law, instead of just an exploitable quirk of the Senate rules. But if that is to happen, then it has to be NOW, while Democrats possess enough self-preservation to vote for such a measure. There are no more senators like Manchin and Sinema who would be willing to preserve the rights of the minority – even the most reasonable Democrat in the Senate right now, John Fetterman, would happily vote to kill off the filibuster. Bessent and Trump are one hundred percent correct in stating that the Democrats will get rid of the filibuster as soon as they have control of the Senate again, but their solution would be to use the weapon first, and then reap the consequences later. Boreing’s proposal, while not exciting or fun, preserves the rule that has kept the rights of the minority intact for over 200 years. However, if the Democrats won’t vote for it, then at that point, the GOP would likely go with the nuclear option, because the jig is up. But what does it hurt to offer the filibuster amendment first? It would be a test for the Democrats to see if they will choose to undermine their own standing, and if they refused, then it’s on their own heads.

Nothing lasts forever in politics, and while the current GOP senators like John Thune know that, asking the Senate Democrats to support a filibuster amendment right now would make them admit to their end game, which is creating new states and giving themselves a permanent majority in the Senate with four new Democrat senators (so they assume). Trump and Bessent may very well get what they want in the end, but there is no reason to make it easy for the Democrats.

Featured image via Proulain on Pixabay, cropped, Pixabay license