Eliminating the filibuster won't matter as much as you think

For our analysis, we looked into the parties’ legislative efforts on their agenda priorities, drawing on journalistic coverage and several interviews with key players to ascertain why failures occurred. We found that filibusters were the cause of failure on only about one-third of the Democrats’ failed agenda items during the Obama years, and on just one of six failed items when the Democrats controlled both the House and Senate in 2009–10. This tally even includes instances in which news reporting indicated that the Democrats dropped a legislative drive in anticipation of a Senate filibuster. By contrast, almost 60 percent of failures during the Obama years were attributable to disagreements within the party. For instance, in 2009–10, Senate Democrats never came close to passing a climate-change bill. Because of internal disagreements, the 2009 cap-and-trade bill passed the House of Representatives only with the help of a few Republican votes. But differences among Democrats then doomed the bill in the Senate, as lawmakers from oil-drilling and coal-mining states never got on board. Likewise, Democrats were unable to coalesce to repeal the “midnight regulations” adopted in the waning months of the Bush presidency. Democrats also failed to unify around a new direction in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and, after internal dissention, wound up passing military appropriations with overwhelming support from Republicans that continued operations with no significant change. Republicans in recent years have also seen many of their party’s legislative ambitions fail, but rarely because of the filibuster. In the most recent case of Republican unified control (2017–18), during the first two years of President Donald Trump’s term, every case of failure in our data was due to disagreements within the GOP. Republicans could not agree on how to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Despite devoting nine months to the effort, Republicans were unable to overcome their differences, even on the “skinny repeal” bill, which three moderate Republican senators—Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and John McCain of Arizona—decisively rejected.