It’s a scenario that has played out repeatedly for decades in the Senate: A narrow majority, intent on getting its way on legislation it prioritizes, is held back by the filibuster, and threatens to break it and change Senate rules, but proves unable to do so. It happened over tax reform in the George W. Bush years, the Affordable Care Act’s “public option” in the Barack Obama years, election reform and abortion in the Joe Biden years, and now a voter-ID law that President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans would like to advance.
Each time, a key part of the argument that the Senate majority makes to itself is that the other party will surely blow up the filibuster when it next gets a chance, so refusing to do it now would be a kind of unilateral disarmament. Yet in each case, at least so far, that other party has not pulled the trigger when its own time in the majority came.
The filibuster’s luck may well run out in one of these fights. The notion that Democrats would eliminate it when they’re next in the majority—as Republicans have been telling themselves over and over in the ongoing fight over the SAVE America Act, in recent days—is by no means implausible. When they were last in power, the vast majority of Democratic senators claimed to want to change or eliminate the 60-vote requirement that has come to be applied to nearly all significant legislation.
But the filibuster’s survival has not just been a matter of luck. It is better understood through the lens of legislator incentives. The filibuster has always had more friends than it has seemed to, because it is enormously helpful to the most ideologically moderate members of the majority party in the Senate.
Those senators, who are the most endangered and are therefore essential to their parties, tend to resist ideas that party activists love but swing voters hate. In the absence of the filibuster, the moderates of the Senate’s majority party would have to constantly say no to their colleagues on a vast range of such issues. These moderates would be under endless pressure on bill after bill. But because of the filibuster, they can say no on just one issue—the question of changing the Senate’s rules. Then the Senate can get on with the work of building coalitions for legislation that might be able to garner bipartisan majorities, or limit itself to the tax and spending provisions that can sometimes bypass the filibuster.
By definition, each Senate majority (and minority) will always have some set of senators who are its most moderate members, and so are subject to these pressures. Republicans who are certain that Democrats will eliminate the filibuster when they next get the majority point out that the two senators who kept it alive last time—Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema—are no longer in office. But that doesn’t mean that some combination of, say, John Fetterman, Maggie Hassan, Tim Kaine, Jacky Rosen, Angus King, Mark Warner, and Ruben Gallego aren’t just as reticent to actually enact progressive hot-button bills that voters in swing states would hate. All of them (and surely others too) were likely grateful that Manchin and Sinema allowed the filibuster to survive last time, and some of them may well stand up for it next time rather than get drawn into an endless cycle of political pain.
There is no guarantee that the personal political incentives of such senators will continue to overwhelm the partisan political incentives that all senators face. But the logic that has long enabled the filibuster to survive isn’t going away.
Describing the filibuster this way can make it sound cynical and undemocratic. But it is essential to the healthy functioning of American politics, and for reasons that run much deeper than the personal incentives of Senate moderates.
The fact is that today’s divided Congress is actually quite representative of today’s divided America. Congress pretty closely reflects the country’s overall ideological makeup. And when we are so tightly divided, it is only right that our representatives not advance highly contentious legislation on pure party-line votes.
The filibuster has repeatedly prevented such civic vandalism. In 2021, Joe Biden and exceedingly narrow Democratic majorities in both houses came into office in the wake of a crisis of confidence in the American election system fanned by Donald Trump’s refusal to accept his narrow defeat. Amazingly, the Democrats thought that would be the right moment for the federal government to take over key election rules in every state by reducing standards for voter registration, proof of identity, eligibility, ballot harvesting, early voting, drop boxes, mail voting, locations and hours of polling stations, voting by felons, campaign donations, and more.
And they wanted to do this in a purely partisan way. The bill they advanced as their top priority was supported by nearly every elected Democrat in Congress and no elected Republicans. Whatever you think of the substantive case for it (and I thought it was wholly unpersuasive), as a practical matter, it was pure madness. And it was prevented only by the filibuster.
Much the same is true of the SAVE America Act today. Voter ID is a good idea, is already required in some form in many states, and has broad support among the public. But the specific bill Republicans are advancing would be too intrusive in its nationalization of voting rules and would create enormous practical problems for some states, especially those with widespread voting by mail. The problem it purports to solve—coordinated mass voter fraud in blue states—exists mostly in President Trump’s imagination. And the bill is, in any case, supported only by Republicans in Congress. Frustrating though it is, the filibuster will do American political culture a favor by preventing a further nationalization of election rules on a party-line vote.
Meanwhile, the filibuster has also facilitated essentially all of the substantively meaningful bipartisan legislation we have seen over the past decade or so. Annual appropriations deals as well as laws involving education, medical research, criminal-justice reform, infrastructure, domestic semiconductor manufacturing, gun control, and reforms of the Electoral Count Act, among others, have only advanced through cross-partisan bargaining because the filibuster made such bargaining unavoidable.
The narrow Senate majorities that had to deal with minorities in each of those cases found that work aggravating. But that’s the point. The filibuster is there to frustrate narrow majorities so that they have to deal with the minority party and so legislate by bargaining and accommodation. That doesn’t feel great for the majority, but it is the right way to govern ourselves, especially in an intensely polarized era like this one.
That isn’t undemocratic. It’s how American democracy works best—not by empowering slim and ephemeral majorities to roll over minorities, but by drawing the parties into negotiated settlements despite themselves. The frustration this creates should not lead senators to discard their chamber’s long-standing protection of minority-party prerogatives. It should lead them to negotiate, and so to produce more durable if less satisfying bipartisan legislation.
The fear that the other party will blow up the filibuster when it gets a chance is not an argument for doing that work for them in advance. Senators should want to make the filibuster as sturdy as possible and make eliminating it as costly and unlikely as they can. The other party is not as headstrong as they imagine, and the filibuster may well have more friends than they think.
Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of National Affairs. He is the author, most recently, of American Covenant (2024). This essay was previously published by The Free Press.
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