Abolish, Reform or Keep the Filibuster: The Argument Inside the Party

The vote came late on January 19, 2022, after a day of speeches that everyone in the chamber knew would not change the result. Senate Democrats had spent months building a combined voting rights bill, named partly for the late John Lewis. They had fifty votes for it, plus the vice president to break a tie. They did not have sixty. So Majority Leader Chuck Schumer asked the Senate to change its rules for this one bill: senators who wanted to block it would have to hold the floor and keep talking, and when the talking stopped, a simple majority could pass it. Two Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, voted with every Republican against the change. It failed 48 to 52. The voting rights bill went nowhere, and the argument over the filibuster moved from the Senate floor into the Democratic Party itself, where it is still going on.

In short: The filibuster lets forty-one senators block most legislation, and Democrats are divided over whether to abolish it, reform it or keep it. Each side has a serious case, and the right answer depends partly on who holds the White House. With a Democratic Senate coming in January 2027 and a Republican president holding the veto, the question is about the next decade, not the next bill.

What the filibuster is, in two paragraphs

Under Senate rules, a senator can keep debate on most measures going unless sixty senators vote to end it through a cloture motion. In practice, this means a minority of forty-one can block a bill without saying a word on the floor; the mere threat of a filibuster forces the majority to find sixty votes or give up. The rule applies to most legislation. It no longer applies to nominations, which since 2013 and 2017 have needed only a majority, and it does not apply to budget reconciliation bills, which are limited to tax and spending changes.

The filibuster is not in the Constitution. The Senate's original rules did not clearly allow endless debate; the possibility appeared after a rules cleanup in 1806 dropped a motion that could have ended it. Cloture was first adopted in 1917 at a two-thirds threshold and lowered to three-fifths of the Senate in 1975. For most of the twentieth century, filibusters were rare and were used most notoriously to block civil rights laws. Strom Thurmond spoke for more than twenty-four hours against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Today, cloture votes are routine, and sixty is effectively the threshold for nearly everything that passes.

The case for abolishing it

The abolitionists start with democracy. The Constitution requires supermajorities for a few specific things: treaties, overriding vetoes, impeachment convictions, amendments. By listing those, the argument goes, the framers implied that ordinary laws pass by majority. A rule that lets senators representing a minority of Americans block what a majority wants is a distortion layered on top of an already unequal chamber, where Wyoming and California have the same two votes.

They point to the history. For decades the filibuster's main legislative achievement was delaying civil rights. Anti-lynching bills died that way. The 1964 Civil Rights Act passed only after the longest filibuster fight in Senate history. Voting rights protections died that way again in 2022, months after the Supreme Court's decisions had weakened the Voting Rights Act and before the Court in Louisiana v. Callais in April 2026 held that the act did not require Louisiana's second majority-Black district.

And they point to accountability. When the filibuster blocks a popular bill, voters cannot tell who to blame: the majority says the minority blocked it; the minority says the majority would not compromise. Without the filibuster, a party that wins power passes its program and faces voters on the results. If the program fails, the voters throw it out. That, abolitionists say, is how a democracy is supposed to work.

The case for keeping it

The defenders have arguments that deserve more respect than they usually get on the left.

The first is about the other side. Every rule a majority abolishes is abolished for the next majority too. In 2025, Republicans controlled the presidency, the House and the Senate. The filibuster was what stopped them from passing anything they wanted on a party-line vote outside of reconciliation: national abortion restrictions, a gutting of labor law, changes to elections. Democrats used it in the 2025 shutdown fight. The president publicly urged Senate Republicans to abolish the filibuster in the fall of 2025, and Republican leaders declined. Progressives who were relieved by that refusal have to reckon with why.

The second is about durability. Laws passed by narrow party-line majorities can be repealed by the next narrow majority. Laws that needed sixty votes, and therefore some members of both parties, tend to last. Major legislation that crossed party lines, from the Civil Rights Act to the Americans with Disabilities Act, has proven hard to undo precisely because it was built broadly.

The third is about restraint. Defenders argue that the Senate exists to slow things down, cool passions and force compromise. A chamber that operates exactly like the House adds little except another set of elections.

The case for reform

Between those two camps sits a large and varied middle, where many Democratic senators actually live.

Reformers mostly want to restore the cost of filibustering. The "talking filibuster" Schumer proposed in 2022 would require opponents to stay on the floor and keep debating; when they stopped, the bill would get a majority vote. Others suggest shifting the burden: instead of the majority needing sixty votes to end debate, the minority would need to keep forty-one senators present and voting to continue it. Some propose lowering the cloture threshold gradually over the course of a debate. Others want carve-outs, the way nominations and reconciliation were carved out before, for voting rights, for raising the debt limit or for bills that protect constitutional rights.

The appeal of reform is that it keeps some protection for the minority while ending the silent, costless veto. The criticism, from both sides, is that carve-outs are unstable. Once a majority exempts the issues it cares most about, the next majority will exempt its own. Reform may end up as abolition in slow motion.

The workaround that has become the main road

One reason the filibuster argument feels abstract to many voters is that Congress has quietly built a detour around it, and both parties now drive on that detour constantly.

Budget reconciliation lets a bill pass the Senate by a simple majority, but only if it changes taxes, spending or the debt limit and survives a set of limits called the Byrd rule, named for Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia. The Senate parliamentarian, a nonpartisan official, decides what qualifies. In 2021, the parliamentarian ruled that an increase in the federal minimum wage could not be included in the pandemic relief bill, and it came out. Democrats used reconciliation for the American Rescue Plan in 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. Republicans used it for tax cuts in 2017 and for their large tax and spending law in 2025, which also cut Medicaid.

This has distorted how both parties legislate. Ideas that could be written as straightforward rules get rewritten as tax credits or spending formulas so they qualify. Policies that cannot be translated into budget terms, such as voting rights, labor law or immigration reform, have almost no path at all unless sixty senators agree. A party that keeps the filibuster in place is effectively choosing a legislative system where money moves by majority vote and rights do not.

There is a lesson here for each camp. Defenders of the filibuster should admit that it is already riddled with exceptions and that the most consequential laws of recent years passed without sixty votes. Abolitionists should admit that the exceptions have not ended the Republic, but they have produced laws that swing back and forth with each change in power.

A history worth keeping straight

The filibuster's history is often told in slogans by both sides, so it is worth being careful. The 1964 Civil Rights Act did pass with bipartisan support after its opponents filibustered for months; when the Senate invoked cloture in June 1964, it was the first time it had ever done so on a civil rights bill. Defenders of the rule point to that as proof the filibuster forces durable, bipartisan laws. Critics point out that it took years of failed attempts, a mass movement in the streets and the shock of a president's assassination to get there. Both readings are true. Neither settles the question for 2027.

Why the answer depends on the White House

Here is where the argument changes for 2027, and here my opinion comes in.

With a Republican president, a Democratic Senate gains little from abolishing the filibuster. Any bill it passes by a simple majority still has to survive a veto, and Democrats will not have two-thirds of both chambers. The filibuster's main effect in 2027 and 2028 will be to let Senate Republicans block Democratic bills, and those bills would mostly be vetoed anyway. In that setting, the filibuster mostly decides whether the president has to put his name on a veto. There is a decent argument that forcing those vetoes, by getting bills to his desk, is more valuable politically than the fight over the rule itself.

The serious decision comes if Democrats win the presidency in 2028 and keep the Senate. Then the filibuster will again determine whether a Democratic government can pass voting rights protections, a restored and modernized Voting Rights Act, labor law reform, climate measures beyond what reconciliation allows and changes to the courts. The party's internal argument now is really about that future.

My view: the strongest position for progressives is reform with a clear principle. Restore the talking filibuster so the minority must pay a real cost to block, and protect laws that safeguard the right to vote, because a democracy cannot let a minority entrench itself by blocking the rules of elections. That position concedes something real to the defenders: the minority should be able to slow things and force public debate. It answers the abolitionists' best point: no minority should be able to stop the majority silently and forever on the fundamental rules of democracy.

One honest caveat belongs here. A talking filibuster is harder to run than it sounds. The majority has to keep enough of its own members near the floor, day and night, to answer quorum calls, while the minority only needs a few senators willing to keep talking in shifts. Everything else on the Senate's agenda, including nominations and spending bills, stops while it happens. Reformers who favor it should be ready to explain how a majority would actually win a war of endurance, not just why the minority should have to fight one.

Where progressives have made this harder

The filibuster fight has also exposed a weakness in how the left argues.

Too often the case has been framed as an inside-baseball fight about Senate procedure, which most voters do not follow and many find tiresome. Meanwhile, the bills that the filibuster blocked had broad public support, but the conversation was about the rule rather than the bills. A movement that talked more about what the votes would deliver, a protected right to vote, a higher minimum wage, cheaper prescription drugs, and less about cloture would have a better chance of building the pressure that changes a senator's mind.

There is also the matter of consistency. Many Democrats defended the filibuster loudly when Republicans controlled the Senate between 2015 and 2021 and then argued for abolishing it in 2021. Republicans did the reverse dance on nominations. Voters notice. Taking a position on principle, one you would accept if the other side held power, is more persuasive than one that changes with the majority.

The voters at the center

The 2022 voting rights bill would have set national standards for early voting, mail voting and registration, and restored federal review of some changes in voting rules. Those are not abstractions for a voter in a county that closes polling places or a citizen whose registration is purged. The people with the most at stake in the filibuster fight are rarely in the gallery: the elderly voter who needs a mail ballot, the shift worker who can only vote early, the student whose ID is rejected.

Plenty of Republican voters want those things too. Ballot measures on voting rules have gone both ways in recent years: Nevada voters approved voter ID in November 2026, while California voters turned down a voter ID measure and Maine voters rejected one in 2025. A fair debate about Senate rules should keep those voters, all of them, at the center.

What you can do

The filibuster question will come back as soon as a Democratic Senate takes up its first big bill. A few ways to be part of it:

• Tell your senators which position you hold, and why, before the rules fight begins. The representatives lookup gives you their contacts and recent votes.
• Follow the state-level fights over maps, ID laws and ballot access on the voting rights and redistricting topic page.
• Make sure your own registration and ID are in order before the next election. The voting page has registration deadlines, ID rules and early and mail voting for every state.
• Look at the bills that did get sixty votes recently on the common-ground page. It is a useful reality check on what the filibuster blocks and what it does not.