The Filibuster: Democracy’s Leash

Image via Michael Ramirez

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Everyone seems to forget that American democracy was never designed to run at full speed. It was built with friction. With choke points and potholes. With intentional inefficiency and systemic buffering. Not because the framers didn’t fear gridlock, but rather, they feared what could ensue when unchecked authority meets political passion. They knew that democratic majorities, when unrestrained, can become just as dangerous as kings. As James Madison stated in Federalist 51, “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

That is the fundamental basis for the filibuster. Not that it’s cute. Not that it’s perfect. But it’s necessary.

The filibuster is a straightforward mechanism: it requires 60 votes to end debate in the Senate. The idea is that the increased threshold restricts the majority, forcing them to accommodate dissent and build coalitions instead of allowing the potential hubris of the majority to persist.  

Thus, the filibuster is not an aberration; rather, it is the brake welded onto a car that the framers never wanted to exceed 100 miles an hour.

Yet, as America entrenches itself deeper into the Trump-era divide, each party’s base begins to develop a kind of ideological hubris. The belief that their fleeting majority represents the nation’s enduring will. The belief that institutional guardrails are only obstacles when inconvenient. Therefore, the filibuster is increasingly viewed as a relic of the past. Though what people call gridlock is actually a governing feature. The Senate was never meant to be a conveyor belt for the party in power. It was designed to slow things down, force coalition-building, and make quick transformations of national life nearly impossible.

Extremism grows in systems without brakes. Majorities in their extremism often abuse power when no one stops them from doing so. This is not abstract theory. We’ve already seen what happens when one party tears down a guardrail and the other responds in kind. Democrats eliminated the judicial filibuster in 2013 to circumvent GOP obstruction. Four years later, Republicans took that precedent and applied it to the Supreme Court. Now, lifetime appointments to the highest court require only 51 votes, opening the door to more judges who are activists before vessels of the law.

And that change isn’t going anywhere, its effects will shape American law forever.

The lesson is simple: once a guardrail is gone, it’s gone for good. No party ever voluntarily reinvents restraints on its own power.

If the legislative filibuster goes next, the arms race becomes all-out. The party in power, Democratic or Republican, will pass sweeping national transformations every time it has 51 votes and a president of the same party. The Affordable Care Act could vanish by Tuesday. A nationwide abortion ban or mandate could pass in an afternoon. Federal election rules could be rewritten every two years. Gun laws, immigration laws, and environmental laws are all beholden to an endless, destabilizing cycle.

A society cannot govern itself when its rules switch every two years. That is not democracy, it’s whiplash.

But, “Let the majority govern,” they say. Yet, the more important question is ignored: Which majority?

Take today as an example: a political climate of the Trump revival, the radically energized GOP base, and the Democratic Party pulled between its moderates and its activist flank, the “majority” is not a stable or coherent bloc. It is a moving target.

This is why Senate Republicans are refusing to abolish the filibuster, despite Trump’s power play. Not because they are defending tradition for tradition’s sake. But because they understand what a fully unleashed majority could mean in the Trump era. Whatever party is in power today will face a brutal reckoning when the pendulum swings back, and it always does.

You cannot pass durable, national-scale reform with a simple majority of 51 votes. You need tolerance, a core pillar of the democratic process. Tolerance is built within the filibuster, calling upon parties to create laws that survive beyond any single election cycle.

Democracy sounds empowering until you recognize that it often means the elimination of minority protections, the erosion of institutional stability, and the evaporation of legitimacy the moment power changes hands. Democracies collapse not because they lack majoritarian force but because they lack mechanisms to restrain that force. The filibuster is not noble, and it doesn’t need to be. It exists for one purpose: to stop the country from being remade overnight by whichever faction happens to scrape together 51 Senate votes. In an age of razor-thin margins, ideological whiplash, and a political culture addicted to punishment, that restraint is not a luxury; it is the last stabilizing force we have. Remove it, and the country won’t accelerate toward progress. It will careen from one extreme to the other until the system itself breaks. That is why the filibuster must stay.

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This article was edited by Abigail D’Angelo.