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Andrew Stanton

By Andrew Stanton

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President Donald Trump on Monday called for the Senate to eliminate the filibuster, an effort previously pushed by dozens of Democrats.

Trump wrote in a post to Truth Social on Monday that Senate Republicans should terminate the filibuster to allow them to “quickly pass everything they ever dreamed of,” including the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. The party that ends the filibuster first will be the party that “survives and thrives,” he predicted.

The filibuster is a Senate procedure that requires 60 senators to vote to end debate on any piece of legislation; once a bill overcomes the filibuster, it only needs 51 votes to pass. Eliminating the filibuster would upend how policy is passed in Washington, D.C., and would grant the party in power a greater ability to advance their agenda without support from the minority party.

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Functionally, the filibuster means any bill must have support from 60 senators to pass through the Senate, a feat that has been particularly difficult in recent years amid slim majorities. Currently, Republicans have a 53-47 majority, meaning seven Democrats are needed to get any bill past the filibuster.

The mechanism has drawn criticism in the past from members of both parties who argue it is responsible for inaction from the Senate. Both conservative Republicans and progressive Democrats have pushed to eliminate the filibuster. Critics argue it enables minority rule and promotes gridlock in Washington. Proponents of the filibuster believe it encourages consensus, and that it would strengthen their rival party when they end up locked out of power.

President Donald Trump attends a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House on July 14, 2026.

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The filibuster has withstood calls for its elimination in the past; some Democrats called for its abolition during former President Joe Biden’s time in office, but those efforts never garnered enough support to advance.

There are still enough institutionalists in the Senate to “stave off this push,” Grant Davis Reeher, a professor of political science at Syracuse University, told Newsweek.

“This impact is potentially huge, depending on how aggressively 51 Republicans want to use the majority to move forward controversial legislation, and how much they could resist any attempts from top leadership to control those impulses,” he said. “It also might expose more clearly the divisions within the Republican majority, as the more moderate members won’t have the filibuster to provide political cover for the initiatives that most concern them.”

Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, told Newsweek on Monday that Thune, unlike the president, has “taken consideration what the votes are, what the whips are, Republicans, and Democrats.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, responded to Trump’s post on X, writing, “It’s a new week in Washington, but one thing remains the same: The SAVE Act is dead on arrival in the United States Senate. It will not pass—not now, not ever.”

Democrats Signed Onto Resolution Urging End of Filibuster: Full List

A total of 35 House Democrats signed onto a resolution calling for the end of the filibuster prior to Trump’s post on Monday.

The resolution reads: “Whereas Congress has a moral imperative to remedy the decadeslong assault on Americans’ civil rights and quickly enact voting rights protections, by removing what former President Barack Obama called the 'Jim Crow relic' of the Senate filibuster, which was used by Strom Thurmond, a segregationist, for 24 hours and 18 minutes to speak in opposition to the Civil Rights Act."

It called for the elimination of the 60-vote threshold “under the next prodemocracy governing moment” as well as structural changes to the Supreme Court such as a code of ethics and term limits.

The following 35 Democrats signed onto the resolution.

Other prominent Democrats have also previously voiced support for ending the filibuster.

Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with Democrats, wrote in a May 2022 statement that lawmakers should bypass the filibuster to codify Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that for decades guaranteed reproductive rights. In the Biden era, centrists like Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, both of whom retired in 2024, opposed ending the filibuster, at times sparking ire from their base.

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Republicans Cast Doubt on Trump’s Filibuster Plea

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, has resisted pressure from Trump and other MAGA Republicans to nix the filibuster. He has said Senate Republicans do not have support for the filibuster and has not signaled any interest in bypassing it.

Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican facing a competitive reelection this year, is another who has opposed ending the filibuster.

“I oppose eliminating the legislative filibuster. The filibuster is an important protection for the rights of the minority party that requires senators to work together in the best interest of the country,” she said in a statement reported by WGME, a local news station, in February.

Any vote to end the filibuster would need support from more traditional, moderate Republicans, given the 53-47 majority in the Senate; it’s not clear they have the votes to do so. If Democrats win seats in the midterms, the path to ending the filibuster could be even more narrow.

Reeher said the Senate nixing the filibuster would “create much more instability in our national policies, which in turn would produce a lot of wasted spending and wasted government effort, as programs were started, then stopped, then restarted, or recreated,” he said.

The filibuster, he said, “forces some kind of cooperation, however anemic that may be at the moment.”

“Can the filibuster hold things up in ways that frustrate majorities? Yes, but at the same time it reserves large policy changes for moments of larger majorities, which on balance, isn’t an obvious flaw,” he said.

Fetterman Shifts Position on Filibuster

On Monday, Senator John Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat, wrote in an opinion piece published by The Washington Post that he was “horribly wrong” for supporting ending the filibuster to advance legislation during the Biden administration.

Fetterman wrote that short-term wins would have “clouded the bigger picture and lasting impact of a Senate without the filibuster,” and that it has stopped the Trump administration from enacting “many unpopular policies.”

“Trump’s victory and Republicans taking control of both chambers of Congress quickly showed how chaotic a simple majority vote could be in the Senate. Media outlets and political pundits are routinely alarmed and outraged over the constant churn of new policies from the current administration. And if Americans are horrified now, imagine what could be law today if Democrats had eliminated the filibuster,” he wrote.

Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Jason Lemon and Sam Wilson.

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