Golden is the author of "Unlock Congress" and a senior fellow at the Adlai Stevenson Center on Democracy. He is also a member of The Fulcrum's editorial advisory board. Bondurant has argued several cases before the Supreme Court and represented Common Cause in an unsuccessful 2010 lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the filibuster.
Buried in the vortex of voices shouting at each other during this week's South Carolina debate were two consecutive answers in which Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg both announced support for a simple rule change that would be a game-changer for the American people: Finally putting an end to the filibuster.
For several years we've been making the legal argument that the cloture rules of the Senate, who now require 60 votes instead of a simple majority to advance legislation, are unconstitutional. Neither lawmaking nor executive branch appointments were included by the Framers in the five scenarios they laid out requiring supermajorities.
The delay tactic of filibustering was actually an accident of history that came about in 1807. Later on, the Senate simply invented the 60-vote rule so that windy grandstanders couldn't just prattle on forever.
But the legality of the rules wasn't the basis for the debate-stage pronouncements by the Massachusetts senator and the former mayor of South Bend, Ind. The passion the two Democratic presidential candidates have for ending filibusters rests on the fact that they have been used in recent decades to block all kinds of things that overwhelming majorities of Americans support — and often majorities in both chambers of Congress.
We fervently agree, and to a significant extent, so have the Senate leaders in both parties over the last decade when it comes to cabinet and judicial appointments.
In 2013, Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid exercised what's become known as the "nuclear option" — eliminating the 60-vote hurdle for confirming executive branch nominees and all federal judges except the most powerful nine.
At the time, Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell seethed about the rule change. But after the GOP gained the majority in 2017, he went nuclear himself to get the filibuster ended for Supreme Court nominees as well. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh are the result.
Passing legislation, the most important task assigned to Congress, is all that remains captive to the filibuster. After his changing of the rules, and in a staggering display of hypocrisy, McConnell stated, "The legislative filibuster is central to the nature of the Senate. It always has been and must always be the distinctive quality of this institution."
The centuries-old label for the Senate of "world's greatest deliberative body" has literally become a punchline. This cruel joke played out most recently when senators refused to allow witness testimony in President Trump's impeachment trial.
And you want to see legislation pass with the potential to improve your life — or even if you only want to see an idea put to an up-or-down vote — that cruel joke has more serious consequences.
The Senate's pompous sense of self-importance and reverence for the filibuster's history only serve as impediments to progress. Buttigieg got specific about this in the most local fashion during the debate, reminding South Carolinians that their legendary segregationist senator, the late Strom Thurmond, "used the filibuster to block civil rights legislation repeatedly. ... It has got to go, otherwise Washington will not deliver."
Those who disagree often reference the apocryphal story of George Washington describing the Senate as a "cooling saucer" for the heated pace of bills passing through the majority-rule House. They warn about the danger of sudden moves in Congress. Conservative author David French made the case that, "at the very least, it's a recipe for increasing bitterness, division, and instability in public policy."
But we already have a record level of bitterness and division. Meanwhile, big bills with broad support are never put to a final vote. It's been a decade, for example, since an expansive immigration reform called the Dream Act reached its high water mark, dying even though 59 senators voted to break the filibuster, and an expansive campaign finance crackdown suffered the same fate even with 57 senators on board.
What the filibuster effectively does is allow a minority of senators, from states with as little as 11 percent of the national population, to effectively veto bills supported by the senators representing 89 percent of Americans.
The irony is that Republicans who gasp at the thought of killing the filibuster, for fear of its long-term effects, have already made possible majority votes on the judges who may wield power for life. Legislation can be corrected by amendment or repealed through the ordinary course of Congress. The same process does not apply to judges.
Interestingly, not only does Reid not regret his decision to make the first weakening of the filibuster, in retirement he supports its outright extinction. Reid has said it is going to happen, it is only a question of when.
A former GOP Senate leader, too, has seemed to see the light in retirement. In 1993 and 1994, Bob Dole set a record for using the filibuster and cloture — more times than it had been used in all the years between 1917 and 1970. But on his 90th birthday, Dole announced, "There are things that should be stopped, but at least there ought to be a vote. It can't continue, this constant holding up of bills." Ah, the wisdom of experience.
In the debate, Buttigieg and Warren stated their unequivocal support for getting rid of the filibuster. But other senators have also stated openness to making the only nuclear move left — including the other two in the presidential race, Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar.
When you stop and think about our country's birth, and the rules the Founders outlined for our representatives to operate under, this question becomes far less confounding. What great harm would befall the Republic, what great democratic values would be lost if the Senate were to become, for the first time in over 200 years, a majoritarian body governed by the democratic principle of majority rule as the Framers of the Constitution intended?
If the Democrats win this November, they might answer that question once and for all.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.