Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell late Monday backed off a demand that Democrats pledge to maintain the 60-vote threshold after centrist Democrats signaled they would not support it.
But there is no agreement between the two parties to uphold the filibuster, and liberal senators and outside groups have no intention of dropping their pressure campaign on Democrats to change the legislative threshold to 51 votes.
On Tuesday, McConnell gave assurances that the filibuster rule would remain in place during the 117th Congress thanks to the Democrats who said they wouldn't vote with their party to eliminate it.
"Basic arithmetic now ensures that there are not enough votes to break the rule," McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said.
But Democrats are not giving up. No sooner had McConnell left the floor, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat, Majority Whip Richard Durbin of Illinois, said the filibuster must be eliminated to pass the Democratic agenda over the likely objections of the GOP.
"There comes a time when we should act, and to merely let every issue get mired down into a 60 vote requirement and filibuster and to have nothing come out of this chamber as a result cannot be what our Founding Fathers envisioned the role of the United States Senate," Durbin said.
On Monday night, McConnell said the demand would no longer hamper the effort to strike a power-sharing agreement with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Statements from Sens. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, and Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona Democrat, indicate that there are not enough votes to end the 60-vote rule unilaterally, McConnell said.
Both Manchin and Sinema have rejected a change to the filibuster rule. Several other centrists are also opposed or undecided.
Senate Democrats control 50 votes, and it would require all Democrats and the tiebreaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris to change the rule. At least five Democrats either oppose eliminating the filibuster or are undecided.
But Schumer, a New York Democrat, characterized McConnell's statement as a retreat from his demand in the negotiations to organize and establish the rules for the newly split Senate.
"Last night, the Republican leader dropped his demand for additional provisions on the organizing resolution and will agree to the 2001 rules that last governed the 50-50 Senate — exactly what Democrats proposed from the start," Schumer said.
Without a pledge to maintain the filibuster in writing, the pressure will continue to build on Senate Democrats.
It won't happen yet, though. Democrats are eyeing another avenue to pass key legislation with just 51 votes. Next week, both the House and the Senate will take up budget resolutions that would pave the way for a tactic called reconciliation, which allows certain legislation to pass the Senate with a simple majority rather than 60 votes.
Democrats are preparing to use reconciliation to pass a significant coronavirus relief package and perhaps legislation to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
But reconciliation is limited to revenue-raising bills and could exclude many critical party priorities, notably the wage increase measure.
Democrats and President Biden are touting reconciliation as an option if GOP lawmakers aren't willing to strike a deal on coronavirus relief spending.
Republicans are likely to reject the measure unless it is narrowed considerably or hashed out in a bipartisan manner. As of late Thursday, Republicans were pessimistic about a bipartisan deal.
"I don't have any real reason to believe that there'll be a narrow bill," Sen. Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican, said. "I think they've decided they want to make the most of the moment and move forward, and I think you'll find out that moving forward in this particular way is a lot more complicated than they think it is."
Speaking from the Senate floor on Tuesday, Schumer said Democrats plan to advance critical legislation, "preferably with our Republican colleagues but without them if we must."
Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont and a socialist who is now the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said Democrats would use the budget reconciliation process to allow the measure to pass with just 51 votes.
But other measures that cannot pass through reconciliation will go nowhere without either getting 60 votes or ending the filibuster.
That's when Manchin, Sinema, and other reluctant Democrats will get pushed to agree to a unilateral Democratic vote to end the 60-vote rule.
Outside liberal groups are waiting to ramp up the pressure.
"Sen. McConnell tried to lock in his ability to control the Senate from the minority on a routine process issue he thought he could win on, but especially now that Democrats stood together to reject him, patience is going to be a lot thinner when he uses the filibuster to block COVID relief, the Voting Rights Act, a minimum wage increase, or the many other reforms people across the country the country are demanding and expecting," the liberal group Fix Our Senate said in a statement on Tuesday.
Newly elected Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat who campaigned on passing new coronavirus aid, said Democrats need to consider the legislation and not just the procedural argument.
"There's a way in which the argument gets reduced to an academic argument about procedure," Warnock said on Tuesday. "And I think what has to be remembered is what's at stake."
