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President Donald Trump on Friday made his most stark appeal yet for Senate Republicans to scrap the filibuster rule and allow simple majority votes to prevail on the shutdown and for most legislation, saying it would mean the GOP would “never lose the midterms and we will never lose a general election” for the foreseeable future.
Speaking in the Cabinet Room during a bilateral meeting and lunch with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban — a leader who has spent years eroding his country’s democratic guardrails to make it nearly impossible for his Fidesz to lose power — Trump was deep into a meandering soliloquy about how Democratic victories in Tuesday’s off-year elections were the result of “lying” about his record on “affordability” when he was pressed on how to end what is now the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. In response, he told the assembled press that the “way to do it” was for Senate Republicans to exercise the so-called “nuclear option” to ditch the upper chamber’s filibuster rule.
“I am totally in favor of terminating the filibuster, and we would be back to work within 10 minutes after that vote took place, and lots of other good things would happen. And it doesn’t make any sense that a Republican would not want to do that,” he said.
As Orban looked on admiringly, Trump also claimed that “only a foolish person” would be against eviscerating the last shred of power available to the minority party in Washington because the current Democratic minority is made up of “crazed people.”
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban looks on as President Donald Trump urges Republicans to scrap the Senate’s filibuster rule and allow passage of voting restrictions that could permanently keep Democrats from winning future elections (REUTERS)
He then rattled off a list of partisan proposals he would push for Congress to enact once the Senate eliminated the ability of the minority party to block legislation, including a national voter identification mandate and a ban on postal balloting, which he has falsely claimed is “corrupt” and rife with “fraud.”
Sending those bills to his desk, Trump said, would mean Republicans “will never lose” next year’s midterms, which current polling shows his party poised to lose their House majority and possibly control of the Senate.
He also said Republicans would “never lose the general election” going forward without a filibuster rule on the books because the GOP would “have produced so many different things for our people, for the people, for the country, that it would be impossible to lose an election.”
Asked if his push to eliminate the Senate filibuster means he is unwilling to compromise with Democrats to end the nearly 40-day standoff over government funding, Trump replied that ending the filibuster would let the GOP end the impasse without any input from the opposition.
“If we terminate the filibuster, the country will be open within 10 minutes after that termination, because we’ll take a second vote, which is the opening of the country, and the Republicans will vote to open the country,” he said.
He later added that bipartisanship “didn’t work” and warned that keeping the Senate’s supermajority requirement would keep the GOP “in a slog with the Democrats” during which “very little for either party will be done.”
The filibuster rule, which dates back to a revision of the chamber’s standing rules under then-vice president Aaron Burr in 1806, has frustrated presidents and congressional majorities from both parties because it has been used to block large chunks of their political agendas from being enacted with bare majorities in each chamber by way of a centuries-old quirk in parliamentary procedure that allows the minority party to prevent up-or-down votes on bills that can’t garner support from at least 60 senators.
Some progressive Democrats pushed to abolish the practice when they had unified control of Washington from 2021 to 2023, but that effort failed because multiple Democratic senators and the entire Republican minority in the chamber voted against it. Most of the Senate’s current Republican conference — including Majority Leader John Thune — still opposes the move despite Trump’s recent advocacy for it.
The president’s demand to eviscerate one of the last remaining guardrails against unchecked GOP power in Washington came just days after his party took devastating losses in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races at the hands of voters who expressed anger over his administration’s failure to address rising prices contributing to an ever-higher cost of living in the U.S.
Citing New Jersey Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill and Virginia Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger’s laser-focused campaigns which centered on “affordability” just one year after voters cited higher prices as the reason for returning him to the White House in the 2024 presidential election, Trump complained that the Democrats’ focus on “affordability” was “a con job.”
“The Democrats are good at a few things, cheating on elections and conning people with facts that aren’t true,” said Trump, who then proceeded to rattle off a list of baseless assertions about the prices of this year’s Thanksgiving dinner staples and gasoline, the latter of which he falsely claimed is available to Americans at $2 per gallon.
“Prices are down under the Trump administration, and they’re down substantially … gasoline is way down, and the other big thing is … inflation is way down … we did a great job on groceries and affordability. The The only problem is the fake news. You people don’t want to report it,” he said.
“The reason I don’t want to talk about affordability is because everybody knows that it’s far less expensive under Trump than it was under sleepy Joe Biden and the prices are way down.”
