Something strange is happening in Washington, and almost nobody is saying the obvious thing about it.
President Trump is publicly demanding that Senate Republicans terminate the legislative filibuster — he told Politico it is “hurting the Republican Party” and should go “without question,” and declared on July 4 that if the GOP kills it and passes the SAVE America Act, Republicans will “not lose an election for 100 years.” Meanwhile, the chairs of the House Black, Hispanic, and Progressive caucuses have introduced a resolution calling for the elimination of the 60-vote filibuster (alongside a Supreme Court overhaul), and Democratic Senate candidates across the map have pledged to nuke it the moment they hold the gavel.
So the president wants it dead. The Democratic base wants it dead. The only people keeping it alive are Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who keeps repeating that “the votes aren’t there,” and institutionalists like Susan Collins, who calls it “an important protection for the rights of the minority party.”
Here is the thing both sides keep dancing around: the filibuster everyone is fighting over is not the filibuster you think it is. And the version worth saving is the one nobody in leadership will touch.
The phone-book filibuster is dead. What replaced it is worse.
When most Americans picture a filibuster, they picture Jimmy Stewart collapsing on the Senate floor, or Strom Thurmond’s infamous 24-hour, 18-minute marathon against the Civil Rights Act of 1957 — still the longest solo speech in Senate history. That was the deal: if you wanted to block a bill, you had to hold the floor. On camera. In public. For as long as your legs, your bladder, and your convictions could carry you. Obstruction had a price, and the price was paid in daylight.
That filibuster has been functionally extinct for half a century. In the early 1970s the Senate adopted a “two-track” system that let the chamber simply set aside a filibustered bill and move on to other business. Nobody has to talk anymore. Nobody has to stand. A minority of 41 senators signals an objection — often by a staff email — and the bill silently dies unless 60 votes materialize to invoke cloture. The talking filibuster became the silent filibuster: all of the veto power, none of the cost.
The modern filibuster is not a heroic last stand. It is a form letter. It turned the world’s greatest deliberative body into a chamber where a supermajority is required for everything and debate is required for nothing.Election Tracker editorial board
The results are exactly what you would expect when obstruction becomes free: it became universal. Cloture votes that were once rare are now routine on virtually every bill. The Senate does not debate anymore; it schedules failure.
Our position: restore the cost
We endorse bringing back the Thurmond-era talking filibuster — the old-school, hold-the-floor, all-night version — and killing the silent one.
This is not a fringe idea, even if leadership treats it like one. Senator Mike Lee, a conservative Republican, has argued for a talking filibuster that would force the minority to hold the floor around the clock; Thune has so far refused. Reform advocates on the left proposed the same thing during the 2021–2022 fights. It is the rare procedural reform with genuine cross-ideological logic, which may be exactly why neither party’s leadership wants it: it preserves minority rights while making leadership actually manage a floor fight.
The mechanics are simple. Keep extended debate. Keep the minority’s power to slow the Senate down. But require that the objecting senators be physically present and speaking, and flip the burden: instead of forcing the majority to find 60 votes to end debate, require the minority to keep 41 senators on or near the floor to sustain it. The moment they cannot, debate ends and the bill gets a simple-majority vote. If a bill is worth blocking, it is worth losing sleep over — literally.
And spare us the argument that marathon floor speeches are a relic. Cory Booker held the Senate floor for more than 25 hours in April 2025 — breaking Thurmond’s record — and it dominated the news cycle for a week. The public rewards visible conviction. The current system rewards invisible obstruction.
Yes, we know who Strom Thurmond was
Let us address the obvious irony head-on: the most famous talking filibuster in American history was deployed against civil rights, by a segregationist, and it was despicable. We are not endorsing the cause. We are endorsing the mechanism — because the mechanism was honest. Thurmond had to stand in front of the country and own his obstruction for 24 straight hours, and history got to watch him do it and judge him for it. Today’s obstructionists get the same veto with total anonymity. If senators are going to block legislation that polls at 55 to 65 percent nationally — and both parties have their lists — the least they owe the country is their face and their feet.
The alternative is worse than either status quo
Because make no mistake about where this is heading. Democrats have pledged to eliminate the filibuster outright if they win the Senate. Trump is pressuring Republicans to beat them to it. Whichever party pulls the trigger first, the Senate becomes a smaller House of Representatives, and every election becomes an existential fight over total legislative control — with policy whipsawing every two to four years. The talking filibuster is the only off-ramp that slows the Senate down without shutting it off, and the only reform that makes obstruction more democratic instead of just redistributing it.
Thune says the votes are not there to end the filibuster. Fine. Are the votes there to make people use it the old-fashioned way? Someone should call the roll and find out.
For the neutral explainer on how the filibuster actually works — cloture, the two-track system, the nuclear option, all of it — see our companion piece: What Is the Senate Filibuster?