Mere hours after the killing of Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump blamed the “radical left” and signaled a crackdown was coming — despite the killer’s identity and motives remaining unknown.
In an Oval Office statement on Wednesday, Trump said his administration would “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”
What exactly he might mean, and what it will look like in practice, remains to be seen. But several prominent right-wing commentators called for taking action against progressive donors and nonprofit groups that they asserted (with zero evidence) were somehow responsible for the killing. Others called for action against the Democratic Party itself.
It’s a dangerous moment, similar to those many other countries — including the United States — have faced in the past. An awful act of violence like Kirk’s killing can become the justification for a government campaign of repression against political opponents who had nothing to do with that killing.
One dark way situations like this often play out is that, as outrage is peaking, the ruling party passes “emergency laws” stripping civil liberties protections or giving the government new legal powers to go after its perceived internal enemies.
But, in the US right now, there’s a huge obstacle to something like that: the Senate filibuster.
The filibuster — a procedural maneuver with which a bill that lacks the support of 60 senators can be blocked — means Trump and the GOP’s 53-seat Senate majority can’t pass whatever they want into law. Either they have to abide by the complex and restrictive budget reconciliation process (which is exempt from the filibuster), or else they need to win over some Senate Democrats.
So, as long as the Senate filibuster sticks around, any repression campaign from Trump would have to rely on existing law or executive authority — or get Democratic votes.
Which is why it’s ironic that, in the days before the shooting, Democrats were in the midst of psyching themselves up for a confrontation that could very plausibly lead to the filibuster’s demise.
For years, the filibuster has been a punching bag for progressives, who blame it for restricting what Democratic presidents can do. Many would be happy to see it go, even now.
And yet, Trump’s attempt to centralize power — and this talk about taking action against progressive donors and groups — shows why the filibuster is actually quite valuable in times of authoritarian threat. If it goes, that’s one fewer guardrail still holding Trump back.
A prolonged government shutdown could well spur Republicans to end the filibuster
Before Kirk’s killing, the hottest topic among Democrats was whether the party’s senators should filibuster to block a new funding bill — and force a federal government shutdown until their demands are met.
Back in March, the last government funding expiration date, Senate Democrats decided not to force a shutdown via filibuster, and the party’s base was apoplectic. Now, the new deadline of September 30 is approaching, and Democrats are debating what they should do this time.
The loudest voices calling for a shutdown fight are motivated by deep concern over Trump’s authoritarianism and a belief that Democrats need to do more to fight back against it. Demanding new restrictions on Trump’s authoritarian moves — and forcing a government shutdown if those demands aren’t met — is one way to do that, my former colleague Ezra Klein argues.
It’s important, though, to try to think a few steps ahead about how a shutdown fight will play out.
Let’s say Senate Democrats really do shut down the government via filibuster, making demands that Trump and Senate Republicans consider unacceptable. And let’s assume — a big assumption, but let’s go with it — that Democrats actually close ranks, hold firm to their demands, and resolve to keep the government shut down indefinitely.
What happens next? I see no plausible world in which Trump meekly caves. Instead, what will happen is that the Senate GOP will face increasing pressure — from Trump and their base — to ram through a rules change that ends the filibuster and gives them the power to make new laws on their own.
Some might argue that Senate Republicans always cave to Trump when he wants something. But that simply isn’t true. Trump has wanted the filibuster gone since the first year of his first term — but Senate Republicans have consistently rejected his demands, preferring to keep it. That’s eight years of not caving on this particular topic.
60 votes to advance a bill, 51 to change the rules?
Senate procedure is a funny thing. It takes 60 votes to overcome a filibuster for a typical bill. But, a majority of 51 senators — or 50 plus the vice president — can, if they so desire, ram through a rules change getting rid of that requirement. This is known as the “nuclear option.”
As you can tell from the name, the nuclear option is considered extreme, and there are longstanding norms against casually invoking it. Still, Senate leaders from both parties in recent years have from time to time used it to alter the rules around confirming nominees; in fact, Republicans deployed it this very week. But for legislation, the current 60-vote threshold to overcome a filibuster has remained unchanged since 1975.
However, if Senate Republicans become convinced that Democrats are abusing the filibuster, if they think Democrats have become completely intransigent in forcing a shutdown with no end in sight, and if they face enough pressure from the right, they will be provoked to end it.
That is: Klein’s shutdown strategy, intended to resist Trump’s authoritarianism, could well result in Trump attaining more power.
Let me spell out this dynamic again. Currently, Senate Republicans do not want to eliminate the filibuster. They’re happy to keep it around (it’s a convenient excuse for telling Trump that no, they can’t do this or that). But, if Senate Democrats use the filibuster in a way they feel is completely unacceptable — like, say, shutting down the government indefinitely if demands they consider unrealistic aren’t met — and if they feel sufficient heat from the right, they will change their minds.
Klein argues that Senate Democrats providing their votes to a status quo government funding bill would be “complicity.”
But, if you’re highly concerned about the authoritarian threat posed by Trump, why would you stoke a confrontation that could well end in one of the last major constraints on his power being removed?
Progressives should think harder about what might happen if Trump is freed from the filibuster
What does a world without the filibuster look like?
Many progressives have long said it would look quite good, actually — better for the country and better for Democrats, and the progressive agenda specifically.
But they’re relying on out-of-date arguments honed in a very different political world — and failing to update their thinking for the threat Trump now poses.
Progressive anti-filibuster sentiment began to congeal in 2009, when Klein and others made the case that the Senate would be better off without it. The immediate context was annoyance that President Barack Obama and Democratic congressional majorities were being hampered from passing the agenda of their liking. The debate roared back in a similar context when President Joe Biden took office in 2021.
The more high-minded argument was that the filibuster is simply bad for democratic accountability. A president and congressional majorities should, the argument goes, be able to actually pass what they want to pass. A majority should get to enact its agenda, and then it will be up to voters to decide whether they like that agenda — and render their verdict in the next election.
Paired with this high-minded argument is an ideologically self-interested one. Progressives believed that ending the filibuster would be more helpful to their ideological and policy aims more than it would be to conservatives’ aims. After all, the argument went, all conservatives want to do with the government is cut taxes; progressives actually want to do things to help people, and the filibuster is holding them back.
The opening months of the second Trump administration should dispel this dangerous complacency — and should especially dispel any illusion that the right doesn’t want to “do anything” with government.
Trump’s appointees have displayed enormous imagination in how they’ve weaponized federal powers to threaten and coerce various societal actors. But they could do much, much more if they had greater authority to rewrite laws.
The filibuster effectively constricts the horizon of the possible. Trump’s retribution agenda is so centered on executive branch powers for that reason. In Project 2025 and other efforts, right-wing thinkers spent years dreaming up ways to enact their agenda through the executive branch, because passing new (non-reconciliation) laws seemed so implausible.
If, all of a sudden, the filibuster went away, and it became possible for Trump to pass whatever new laws he wanted — so long as he bullied enough GOP swing votes into going along — the horizon of the possible would change.
Here’s one concrete example: Back in March, Trump issued an executive order making various demands on states to change their voting systems. But the order is dubiously legal, and it’s unclear how impactful it will be. A new law would be a much more powerful and effective way for Trump to reshape elections.
That gets to one glaring flaw in the aforementioned high-minded argument for filibuster reform. The argument holds that a majority should get to enact its agenda unchecked by the minority and that it should be up to voters to render their verdict on that agenda in the next election.
But what if a president, free of the filibuster, passes new laws interfering with that next election? What if a president, after a national tragedy, seizes the moment to pass emergency laws cracking down on his political opponents?
At a time when so many guardrails holding Trump back are bending and breaking, it seems quite dangerous for Democrats to risk gambling away one of the biggest ones remaining.
