Don't Blow Up the Filibuster to Win One Election

The Mail Voting Problem Nobody Wants to Discuss

Here is the part that the loudest SAVE Act advocates would prefer you not examine too closely: Republicans use mail-in voting, too. Extensively. In states like North Carolina — which Thom Tillis has won twice — absentee ballots have been a significant component of Republican turnout operations. The same is true in Arizona, Georgia, and several other competitive states where Republicans can't afford to suppress their own base's preferred voting methods. This is not a secret. James Blair, a senior White House political advisor, reportedly warned Republican members recently to "tone down" deportation rhetoric because of concerns about Hispanic voter backlash [2]. Internal polling is clearly signaling discomfort. The parallel concern about mail voting is the same phenomenon: Republican messaging that plays well in a primary tweet can cost you actual votes in November. Tillis isn't defending mail-in voting out of fondness for Democratic turnout operations. He's defending it because his constituents use it [1].

A blanket assault on absentee ballots — the kind Trump is pushing for in the expanded SAVE Act — would fall hardest on the senior citizens, rural voters, and working-class Republicans who find Election Day in-person voting logistically difficult. These are not Democratic constituencies. This is the core of the Republican coalition. And any consultant who tells the president otherwise is either not doing the math or hoping you won't.

The Filibuster and the Long Game

Set aside the mail voting specifics for a moment. The more fundamental question is whether breaking the filibuster is worth the cost — and the honest answer is no, not for this, not now. The filibuster is the Senate's most significant structural safeguard against majoritarian overreach. It requires that consequential legislation achieve some level of bipartisan buy-in, or at least enough cross-aisle consensus to stop a bare majority from reshaping the country on a party-line vote. Republicans have been on the right side of this argument for a long time, and not without reason. The filibuster is why Obamacare needed reconciliation workarounds. The filibuster is why Democratic majorities haven't been able to pack the courts or nationalize election law on their own terms. It is, for a party that believes in limited government and institutional stability, one of the most important tools in the toolkit.

The Senate is a place that was built to slow things down. The founders didn't create the filibuster so that the majority could always win quickly — they created a system where governing required persuasion, not just power.

— Sen. John Thune (R-SD), Senate Majority Leader

It is rather rich, incidentally, to watch some of our more progressive colleagues — who spent the better part of a decade calling the filibuster a "Jim Crow relic" and demanding it be abolished — now hold their tongues while Republicans contemplate eliminating it [3]. Consistency, it turns out, is only required when the rule cuts against you. One notes this not to score a point, but as a reminder of exactly what happens when procedural norms get treated as optional: everyone stops trusting them, and the institution breaks down. If Republicans nuke the filibuster today to pass the SAVE Act, Democrats will do the same tomorrow to pass something Republicans like a great deal less. The math on this is not complicated.

What Actual Election Security Looks Like

None of this means the underlying concerns about election integrity are illegitimate. They aren't. There are real and defensible election security measures that Republicans should be pushing — and that stand a better chance of surviving judicial scrutiny and gaining broader public support when they're not bundled with social policy provisions that have nothing to do with how ballots are cast. Citizenship verification at the point of registration is sound policy. Updating and cross-checking voter rolls against reliable federal databases is sound policy. Requiring identification for mail-in ballot requests — with reasonable accommodation for elderly and disabled voters — is sound policy. These are measures with genuine public support across party lines [1]. They don't require eliminating the filibuster. They require making the argument, building the coalition, and doing the legislative work.

The president has a legitimate interest in election security. The SAVE Act's core provisions deserve serious debate and, potentially, enactment. But the path to lasting election reform runs through persuasion and coalition-building, not through procedural shortcuts that leave half the country convinced the rules were changed specifically to disadvantage them. That's not a foundation for electoral confidence. It's a recipe for a legitimacy crisis — which, one might note, is precisely what the bill is supposed to prevent.

The Senate Should Hold

Thune, Tillis, Murkowski, and Collins are not blocking the SAVE Act because they're soft on election security. They're blocking the filibuster gambit because they've seen what happens when the majority treats procedural rules as an inconvenience rather than a feature. You don't have to agree with every vote they've cast to recognize that on this particular question — whether to permanently alter the Senate's operating rules to pass one bill in one election cycle — they're right. Trump wants to "guarantee the midterms." The filibuster won't guarantee anything except that the next time Democrats control the Senate, there will be nothing standing between a Democratic president and whatever they've been waiting years to pass. Republicans should think very carefully about whether one election is worth that trade. Election integrity matters. Institutional integrity matters more. And the Senate, at its best, is the place where someone says that out loud.