Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) (Drew Angerer/Getty)

A debate over ending the Democratic minority’s ability to filibuster legislation has broken out among Senate Republicans.

“I will tell you there’s just a lot of push from a lot of people,” one GOP senator speaking on condition of anonymity tells National Review. “They’ve seen the Democrats do it, so they want Republicans to do it.”


Such a change would require the use of the so-called “nuclear option,” the rule change Democrats employed in 2013 to make judicial nominations confirmable by a simply majority rather than by the traditional three-fifths vote. Though Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) wants to protect the filibuster, the issue is blurring the establishment/conservative battle lines typical of other recent debates within the GOP conference. Republicans’ failure to produce the legislative victories that their conservative constituents hoped for, despite complete control of Congress, has even some leadership allies contemplating a move to end the legislative stalling tactic.

The debate went public last week when former National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman Jerry Moran (R., Kan.) called for the GOP to nuke the filibuster in order to win a final vote on a bill disapproving of the Iran deal. “This becomes the moment, in my view, in which you can look at what has transpired on the debate on Iran and reach the conclusion that the 60-vote rule is damaging to the future of our country,” Moran said. Two days later, 57 House Republicans reiterated Moran’s view in a letter to McConnell.

Moran’s statement received scant media attention, but it marked a change from his 2012 position that the filibuster is an important means of protecting the minority. Senator Lamar Alexander (R. Tenn.) deemed the reversal serious enough to warrant a public response. “Most of the time, Republicans have been the minority needing that protection,” Alexander said. “If Republicans use the nuclear option, we would be operating in the same lawless fashion that the Democrats did in 2013.”



#share#Alexander also warned of the political danger of such a move, noting that Democrats enjoyed complete control of the government during 22 of the last 70 years and could regain it in 2016. “My prediction is that at the top of the agenda [if Democrats retook Congress] would be a federal law abolishing the right-to-work laws in the 25 states that have them,” he said Monday. His words could be seen as a rebuttal to any Republican who views the passage of right-to-work laws at the state level as evidence that conservatives benefit from simple-majority rule.

Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) is no McConnell ally, but the two agree on value of the filibuster. “I do not believe we should end the legislative filibuster,” he told reporters during a Thursday briefing in his Senate office. “The legislative filibuster slows down legislative action in the Senate, and I believe that, over time, protects human liberty by slowing down the expansion of government.”


For now, even some of the Republicans who might consider using the nuclear option hesitate to do so, given that President Obama still wields the veto pen. “I would be open to it in something extraordinary, but at the end of the day the result is going to be the same: The president is going to veto it, and then we need 67 votes to override it,” Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) said on Tuesday.


Rubio faulted GOP leadership for failing to have a strategy that could advance conservative causes, such as the defunding of Planned Parenthood. “I thought it [was] important for the leadership of our party to have outlined that early in the process as opposed to basically waving the white flag and saying ‘well, we’re going to take some votes, but we know we can’t do anything about it,’” he said.

That’s the kind of frustration that has the filibuster — a practice that has been in place “since Thomas Jefferson wrote the rules of the Senate in 1789,” as Alexander put it — in jeopardy. “It’s very discouraging to me: We worked hard to make certain that the Senate became a place different than it was,” Moran said. “And unfortunately, we see in this circumstance [that] it doesn’t appear to be much different than it was a year ago.”


— Joel Gehrke is a political reporter for National Review.