President Trump wants to get rid of the Senate filibuster, saying the “archaic” rule has stymied good decision-making.
“The filibuster concept is not a good concept to start off with,” Trump told Fox News. “We have so many bad concepts in our rules and its forcing bad decisions.”
Trump’s legislative agenda has run into a wall in Congress, even as he has tried to compensate with a flurry of foreign policy moves and executive orders affecting regulatory policy. In the Senate, an unprecedentedly slow process of confirming his nominees consumed valuable time in his first 100 days, while House lawmakers have struggled to cobble together the votes needed to pass a Republican healthcare overhaul.
“You’re really forced into doing things that you would normally not do except for these archaic rules,” he said in the interview, which aired Friday night.
The filibuster is a perennial irritant to presidents. The Obama administration had to engage in politically unpopular bartering to secure the 60 votes needed to pass Obamacare in 2010, over the objection of the Republican minority. Now, with Republicans in control, they have to be mindful of the same 60-vote threshold when developing their own healthcare bill. At the same time, Senate Democrats have the power to block spending bills that include funding for Trump’s border wall, risking a government shutdown that Republicans fear would make them look incompetent.
“Maybe at some point we’re going to have to take those rules on, because for the good of the nation things are going to have to be different,” Trump continued.
That would be a heavy lift in the Senate, as the rules require a two-thirds majority to change the rules. Democrats would never agree to that, so Republicans would have to break the rules to change the rules. They did so to confirm Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, but the Senate Republican conference killed a proposal to make other rules changes designed to speed up the Senate.
“It was more than the traffic would bear,” a GOP senator said. “We’re already breaking the rules for Gorsuch, and then we’re going to break more rules right away?”
