WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 28: U.S. Senate Majority Leader Sen. John Thune (R-SD) speaks as (L-R) Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Senate Majority Whip Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), and Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) (L) listen during a news briefing after the weekly Senate Republican Policy Luncheon at the U.S. Capitol on January 28, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Led by President Donald Trump, a growing choir of conservatives is urging Senate Republicans to kill the filibuster to pave the way for bills that would impose strict photographic identification requirements on the right to vote, potentially disenfranchising millions of eligible, legal voters.
Doing so could be a gift in disguise to Democrats, experts say, as the filibuster has more frequently frustrated progressive proposals, both historically and in recent years, than derail conservative priorities.
But whether that reality will deter the GOP remains to be seen.
After passing the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE) Act — described at the time as “the most extraordinary attack on voting rights in American history” — through the House in the spring, Republicans are doubling-down now. On Friday, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced a new version, the SAVE America Act, which adds a photo ID requirement when voters cast their ballots to the SAVE Act’s documentary proof of citizenship requirement at registration.
A day earlier, House Administration Committee Chair Bryan Steil (R-Wisc.) offered his own beefed up bill, the Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act, which includes the same photo ID provisions as the SAVE America Act, while also forcing states to end universal vote-by-mail, ban mail-in ballot grace periods, restrict third-parties from helping voters cast ballots, and proscribe ranked-choice voting.
The Republicans claim the bills are needed to prevent noncitizens from voting, even though that is already illegal and exceedingly rare, as election officials across the country have proven repeatedly. Still, Trump was again spreading lies about noncitizens voting Monday, grousing on Dan Bongino’s podcast that “these people were brought to our country to vote and they vote illegally.”
Over the weekend, Lee posted a clip of an advocate urging Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) to bring it up for a vote, saying it was vital to the upcoming midterms. “This is an either-or proposition,” Lee wrote. “We must either pass the SAVE America — very soon — or prepare to lose.”
To date, 49 Republican senators have either cosponsored the original SAVE Act or expressed public support for it or a similar proposal, leaving just four potential no votes. But even if they all ultimately voted for it, the proposal would need at least seven more votes to make it past a filibuster.
The improbability of that is what has driven Trump’s frequent demands to “TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER” in social media posts and threatening to back primary opponents if Senate Republicans don’t comply.
Lee has echoed Trump’s calls to end the practice, calling it the “zombie filibuster.” Far-right members of the House have also encouraged their Senate colleagues to reduce the vote threshold to end cloture to 50, with Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisc.) recently tweeting, “it’s time to bust the filibuster and get [the SAVE Act] done.” At the same time, a host of MAGA influencers, including Eric Daugherty, Scott Presler, and Gunther Eagleman, are urging the GOP to nuke the filibuster.
Some Republicans in the House, led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Florida), want to attach a version of SAVE to the text of the funding bills expected to pass the chamber this week. Luna has even threatened to somehow shut down the House floor if it doesn’t.
“Do not let Republicans fool you. If the SAVE Act (or SAVE America Act) is not attached to an appropriations bill, it will fail as a standalone measure in the Senate,” she wrote on X. “That is why any appropriations package coming out of the House MUST include it. I am fully aware that leadership plans to bundle five of the bills together; however, the DHS bill will be a standalone and MUST have the SAVE Act attached.”
On Monday, Luna stepped up her full court press. According to CNN reports, Luna is now whipping other Republicans to vote against the funding package that would end a short partial government shutdown.
Any last second addition to the spending package would upset the delicate balance negotiated in the Senate, where Democrats forced Republicans to continue negotiating provisions to rein in the Department of Homeland Security’s violent and unlawful immigration enforcement tactic.
Still, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) can afford to lose zero votes from his caucus — when Representative-elect Christian Menefee (D-Texas) is sworn in after winning a special election this weekend to fill the seat vacated after Rep. Sylvester Turner died, the GOP’s margin in the House will fall to just two, meaning a single defection on party-line votes could doom a Republican-backed measure.
The headaches caused by adding a version of the SAVE ACT to the funding bill — which would then need to go back to the Senate, extending the shutdown at least a week, without any guarantee the upper chamber wouldn’t immediately strip it out — has led many advocates to focus instead on demanding the Republican-led Senate to end the filibuster to enact the bill over Democratic objections.
If that happens, the filibuster would be all but dead in all contexts, said Michael Thorning, Director of the Structural Democracy Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
“Everyone who has worked in a legislative body, particularly the US Congress, knows that slippery slopes are real, and the filibuster is already on one,” Thorning said. “Any sense that you can carve out some kind of principle around, ‘what kinds of policies [are still subject to filibustering] if we get rid of the legislative filibuster,’ — I think is really wishful thinking.”
And that would be good news for Democrats in the long run.
“The filibuster, for good or for ill, protects more Republican issues than Democratic issues,” said Daniel Schuman, executive director of the American Governance Institute. “Giving up the filibuster, for Republicans, would be letting Democrats compete on a more level playing field, which is not necessarily something that they would want to do.”
Schuman noted that exceptions for the filibuster already exist for certain nominations, war powers resolutions, and budget reconciliation. That makes it easier to jam fiscal legislation like tax breaks through the Senate than the kind of social policies often pursued by Democrats, like pollution controls.
The next time Democrats took control of both Congress and the White House, they would simply repeal the SAVE Act, replacing it with legislation that makes it easier to vote, along with a host of other progressive priorities.
The sanctity of the filibuster has steadily eroded over the last dozen years or so, as Senate Democrats and Republicans alike have set it aside. Sen. Harry Reid invoked the so-called “nuclear option” first in 2013, ending the filibuster for all presidential nominees except for Supreme Court justices. A few years later, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) nuked that rule to clear the way for a vote on Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Democrats later toyed with the idea of ending the filibuster on regular legislation when they controlled both chambers of Congress and the White House between 2021 and 2023. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had proposed replacing the 60-vote threshold to end debate with a “talking filibuster,” where legislation could be held up so long as an opponent was speaking against it.
Schumer hoped to pass two critical bills – the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. Combined, the legislation would have ended partisan gerrymandering, beefed up campaign finance disclosures, expanded same-day registration, spread mail-in voting, protected voter registration rolls, made Election Day a federal holiday and reinstated parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act struck down by the Supreme Court.
But two then-Democrats — Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — voted against the plan. Both later left the party before retiring.
Those election bills were hardly the only laws Democrats would have enacted but-for the filibuster back then. During the 117th Congress, the House passed the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, a comprehensive pro-worker reform package; a statehood bill for Washington, D.C.; and the Paycheck Fairness Act, making it easier for women to make pay discrimination claims. Common Cause compiled a list of 17 pro-democracy bills that fell short due to the filibuster.
The Center for America Progress issued a similar report in 2019 citing dozens more bills in recent years that either died in the Senate after passing the House or never even came up for a vote because the sponsors recognized the futility, including the DREAM Act, campaign finance reform, and gun control legislation.
Thorning said it makes sense that election policy so often is at the heart of the filibuster-ending debates, pointing to the work of Princeton University political scientist Frances Lee, author of “Insecure Minorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign.”
“The reason this has become so much closer to a reality — although I’m quite pessimistic that the trigger gets pulled on this —is that we have insecure majorities,” he said. “It’s flip flopping back and forth. The highest imperative right now for the parties is not policy making, not accomplishing their agenda — it is the campaign and winning.”
Historically, the filibuster has been most often deployed to hold back societal advancement. According to Sarah Binder, a congressional expert at the Brookings Institution, half of 30 measures killed by a filibuster between 1917 and 1994 were civil rights bills, including laws that would have banned poll taxes and prosecuted lynching.
Despite some loud claims by Senate Republicans for killing the filibuster, Schuman thinks they’re less likely to do so when push comes to shove. “People think about the filibuster as blocking major legislation, and it routinely does, but it also empowers each individual member,” he said. “The practical effect of the filibuster is that it gives members tremendous amounts of leverage to block legislation that has the support of 99 other senators, at least in theory. So, giving it up would be challenging from a Republican perspective, because that’s what gives members that agenda control.”
Instead, he suspects Senate Republicans will simply never get around to scheduling the necessary votes; Trump can rail against Senators who vote ‘no’ on a bill, but he can’t threaten to primary them when there is no vote on a bill.
“You fight in the shadows, because he can’t beat you in the shadows,” Schuman said, noting that this administration has quietly withdrawn a record number of presidential nominees after it became clear they’d never get Senate confirmation.
Still, it makes sense to Schuman why Trump is so gung-ho. “He thinks that Congress doesn’t matter,” he said. “A more complaint Congress can rubber stamp the unlawful things that he’s already doing.”
“So maybe there’s value for Trump in doing this, but I don’t see why public members of the Senate would want to make themselves even less relevant than they are now,” Schuman added. “Unless they’re just enthralled with Trump or afraid to push back against him, which certainly seems true for the vast majority of them.”
