Copyright New York Daily News
Bravo to Senate Majority Leader John Thune and other Republican senators for refusing to even consider President Trump’s demand to get rid of the filibuster that protects the rights of the chamber’s minority. It’s rare these days for the MAGAfied GOP to push back on the wannabe king of America. Trump is eager to change the Senate rules that let members stall the proceedings, which has been a feature of the Senate since it was founded in 1789, because the month-long government shutdown is only getting more unpopular and driving voters away. The president wants to move ahead and reopen Uncle Sam without any attempt to engage with Democratic counterparts at all. Thune and his Republican colleagues know better. The filibuster has survived throughout Democratic and Republican-controlled Senates and along successive presidential administrations, and that even as generally pliant of a Congress as this one is saying no to Trump over this demand. Perhaps there is a realization among GOP lawmakers that toeing the Trump line on this is effectively a last straw; after that, there will be even fewer real bulwarks to halt Trump’s efforts to remake the country in his own image. Perhaps this is a purely cynical choice — the Senate GOP choosing to maintain the filibuster so that they won’t have to be the ones to vote against Trump agenda items they don’t want anyway and take the heat from an enraged White House — but that’s politics for you. If people acting in a self-interested manner can maintain some stability and keep Trump’s authoritarian impulses at bay, then so be it. It was 12 years ago, when Harry Reid, the Democrat then in control of the Senate, made a terrible mistake to do away with the 60-vote requirement for presidential nominations, and now here we are with a federal judiciary populated by Trump-picked lifetime judges like religious nutjob Matthew Kacsmaryk or Emil Bove, the former personal Trump criminal defense lawyer who has been reportedly told Justice Department employees to get ready to ignore federal court orders. Reid started the ball rolling to ease some of President Barack Obama’s picks, but the chipping away at the filibuster got worse and worse. At first, the 60-vote threshold was kept in place for nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court, until it wasn’t. This year, Thune further weakened the filibuster by allowing for large batches of nominations to be bundled together. But at least Thune is holding out against further changes that Trump wants. Thune knows that it would be a huge blunder to get rid of the filibuster now, especially as Republicans look down the barrel of a blue wave election in next year’s midterms as much of the public comes to realize that they were bamboozled by Trump’s empty promises. As much as Trump and his cronies like to pretend that they’ll always be in power, as with their absurd and unconstitutional push for the ailing near-octogenarian to serve a third term, the fact of the matter is that they will not be at the helm forever, and the GOP should sure want to keep in place some of the measures that protect the political minority’s priorities in the Senate. On that note, Thune should also shoot down Trump’s effort to get rid of the so-called blue slip, which senators use to sign off on or tank federal judicial and prosecutorial nominations from their home states. We have enough unqualified people serving as it is; we do not need Trump sailing through judges and prosecutors like Alina Habba to pursue his political enemies, as he’s promised to do many times over.
