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...
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