President Trump urged Senate Republicans to end the filibuster, the longstanding rule that requires 60 votes to advance most legislation, in order to reopen the government without the support of Democrats.
“It is now time for the Republicans to play their ‘TRUMP CARD,’ and go for what is called the Nuclear Option — Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW!” he wrote on Truth Social, while criticizing Democrats’ healthcare demands at the center of the current impasse. Trump said that Democrats would end the filibuster if they ever won back the Senate, so Republicans should go ahead and do it now.
“If we did what we should be doing, it would IMMEDIATELY end this ridiculous, Country destroying ‘SHUT DOWN,’ ” he wrote.
Government funding lapsed on Oct. 1 after a stopgap spending bill passed by the Republican-led House fell five votes short of the 60 needed in the Senate. Since then, Democrats have blocked the bill more than a dozen times, saying they won’t provide the votes to reopen until Republicans negotiate a deal to extend enhanced Affordable Care Act health-insurance subsidies.
The standoff has frustrated many Senate Republicans, prompting some to float the idea of ending the filibuster rather than continuing to try to reach a deal with Democrats.
But Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) and other GOP senators have promised to protect the filibuster. Thune said last week it would be a “bad idea” to kill the rule to end the shutdown. Last fall, before the presidential election, Thune said Senate Republicans would have to resist calls from Trump to nuke the filibuster, “and I hope that he understands that.”
Eliminating the filibuster would allow the majority party to pass legislation with just 51 votes and would have far-reaching consequences for how Congress operates. Democrats tried to weaken the rule during President Joe Biden’s administration, but centrist Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema blocked the effort, saying it would undercut the need for compromise in the chamber and lead to wild swings in policy. Manchin and Sinema later retired as independents….
Category Archives: legislation and legislatures
“Congress is losing its grip on the power to spend Americans’ money”
There are really three political parties in Washington, according to an old saying: Democrats, Republicans and appropriators.
The latter aremembers of Congress lucky enough to get placed on the powerful committees that dole out roughly $1.6 trillion in federal funds for the military and government serviceseach year. They have traditionally shared a common goal of jealously guarding their tremendous ability to steer federal resources. It’s a bond that often defies the political rules of gravity that govern everything else on Capitol Hill.
But now, those ties are being tested like never before: The White House was aggressively encroaching on Congress’s power of the purse even before it began using the ongoinggovernment shutdown as justification for rolling back billions more in spending.
Democratic, and many Republican, appropriators are angry at Trump’s White House for unilaterally canceling contracts, abruptly freezing billions of dollars in congressionallysanctioned funding and trying out a “pocket rescission” technique to permanently withhold $5 billionin foreign aidwithout congressional input.
Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress, have largely swallowed those concerns out of fealty to President Donald Trump. In the process, they have allowed their power to erode.
“The administration is taking all the reins and Congress doesn’t really have a say on anything,” said Fred Upton, the Republican from Michigan who chaired the House Energy and Commerce Committee until 2017. “No one’s putting their hand up to say ‘stop.’ It’s just happening.”…
“Congresswoman-in-limbo Adelita Grijalva on the dilemma she faces”
Every office along the second floor of the Longworth House Office Building looks welcoming, flags lined up nicely, most with visitor sign-in logs out front.
Except for the one where the plaque out front reads, “Representative Adelita S. Grijalva, Arizona” — but the doors are locked, with newspapers and internal mail piling up out front.
Grijalva’s (D)offices — both in Washington and back in her district — are closed, leaving the constituents of Arizona’s 7th Congressional District without representation or a single staffer who can answer questions as the government shutdown stretches into its second week.
The phone lines do not even have a courtesy message telling constituents how to reach out to Arizona’s senators for help. The voice answering the phone in the Tucson office is a recording of Grijalva’s father, the late Raúl Grijalva (D). He’s the 11-term lawmaker whose death in March prompted the special election that his daughter won by almost 40 percentage points.
Despite Grijalva’s victory more than two weeks ago, House Republican Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) has refused to swear her into office.
After a fleeting effort last week to get sworn in, she has decamped back to Tucson to mount a media campaign designed to shame the speaker into letting her make history as Arizona’s first Latina in Congress.
“I have the will and responsibility of almost 800,000 people to represent, and I need to fight for them. And so I’m going to make this as public as possible,” she said during a videoconference interview Tuesday. “I’m going to continue to highlight the hypocrisy and the fact that this is dangerous. It’s dangerous for our democracy.”…
DOJ’s new lawsuit seems to show DOJ is violating federal law
Justin again. On Wednesday, Ned linked to two new lawsuits DOJ filed in Oregon (here’s the complaint) and Maine (here’s the complaint) over DOJ’s demand to get full copies of the voter files. Though it’s never a great feeling to be sued, I’m glad these suits were filed. Because I think the litigation is likely to show exactly why Oregon and Maine have been right to push back against DOJ’s demands. The Privacy Act still seems like a giant red flag to me.
Leave aside, for a second, the flawed factual predicate in both complaints, which includes an insinuation of wrongdoing based on a repeatedly debunked apples-to-oranges methodology, comparing a pinpoint number of registrants on the file to a multi-year census estimate of eligible locals. (A summary of the problems with the comparison: these aren’t measures of the same information, they’re not measures of the same time range, they’re comparing a snapshot to a survey estimate, and they don’t account for the law. Which is why a federal court said 7 years ago that the disparate data sets do not allow for an accurate comparison and did not amount to credible evidence of wrongdoing, and why the 11th Circuit affirmed that conclusion.)
The real fight here isn’t over inadequate list maintenance. It’s about getting access to the lists themselves.
I’ve written about these DOJ demands for the lists before (for starters, here and here), trying to explain why they’re not particularly useful in enforcing the parts of the statutes the Civil Rights Division says it needs them to enforce. There’s new reporting that indicates DOJ may be after the information for an entirely different reason: to give it to DHS for immigration probes (though that’s likely to be a conspicuously target-poor environment for DHS). The Civil Rights Division hasn’t mentioned that little detail in its demands to the states.
But the real sticking point for me is the Privacy Act, which I think affirmatively precludes the DOJ from getting the voter files until it answers some basic questions about who would have access to what information for what purpose. (Indeed, the Privacy Act makes it a federal crime to collect the info first and explain later.)
The DOJ has been demanding these files with such confidence that I’ve been wondering whether there’s some not-visible-to-outsiders internal document that relieves those Privacy Act concerns. Both the Oregon complaint and the Maine complaint begin to lay out DOJ’s response to why it’s complying with the Privacy Act. And if what they said is all they got, that’s an awful lot of confidence without the substance to back it up.
In the complaints, most of the DOJ responses on the Privacy Act (including their citation of a website for voluntary reports by individual citizens of civil rights violations) are non sequiturs: they just don’t answer the question. But the DOJ does mention the “systems of records notices” – the disclosure required under the Privacy Act – that it thinks authorize grabbing the voter files. (Here, here, and here.) There’s only one that’s even plausibly relevant: it’s the one that allows the Civil Rights Division (CRT) to keep general info on targets, victims, and witnesses associated with their cases. The notice is pretty straightforward, and its roots go back to 1975 (when the information was stored “on index cards and file jackets”).
It’s not hard to understand why law enforcement needs to keep some information on people for cases involving people. Here’s the unedited description of the “individuals covered by the system” that DOJ has provided to the public:
These persons may include: Subjects of investigations, victims, potential witnesses, individuals of Japanese ancestry who were eligible, or potentially eligible, for restitution benefits as a result of their evacuation, relocation, or internment during World War II, and representatives on behalf of individuals and other correspondents on subjects directed or referred to CRT or other persons or organizations referred to CRT in potential or actual cases and matters of concern to CRT, and CRT employees who handle complaints, cases or matters of concern to CRT.
You know who’s not in that list? Voters who are innocent bystanders for all of this nonsense. The 3 million people in the Oregon voter registration file and the 1 million people in the Maine voter registration file aren’t targets, victims, or witnesses of a civil rights investigation. Before the DOJ “explained” itself, I was wondering where DOJ ever notified the public that it’s going to be collecting all those voters’ information. After the DOJ “explained” itself, I’m still left wondering where DOJ ever notified the public that it’s going to be collecting all those voters’ information.
Read the public notice for yourself, and see whether you think it offers fair notice that the Civil Rights Division plans on building a database to collect the personal information of every voter in the country, including not just SSN digits and dates of birth but party registration. The notice DOJ issued decades ago (and updated periodically in the interim) isn’t built to authorize fishing expeditions. It’s built for individual records pertinent to an individualized investigation. Because that’s actually the individualized information DOJ needs when it’s doing its real job.
I suspect that the states resisting DOJ’s demands are going to respond, in part, by saying that they’ve got the right (and responsibility) to decline to abet DOJ’s violation of federal law. That, in turn, means that the DOJ is likely to have to defend its compliance with the Privacy Act in court, with federal judges probing whether they’ve done their homework. And that is a resolution I think Oregon and Maine – and their citizens – are likely to welcome.
“Republicans invoke ‘nuclear option’ in push to change Senate rules”
Republicans moved Thursday to speed up Senate confirmation of President Donald Trump’s nominees by changing the chamber’s rules over the objections of Democrats.
Senators voted 53-45 to allow themselves to change the rules with a simple majorityinstead of 60 votes — a move known as the “nuclear option.”
The rules change will allow the Senate to confirm multiple people at once, helping to clear a backlog of nearly 150nominees awaiting floor votes. Republicans argue it is necessary because Democrats have held up the confirmation process by forcing time-consuming votes on each nominee rather than allowing some of them to be confirmed by voice votes, which is faster.
The change excludes Cabinet officials, Supreme Court justices and federal judges, who must be confirmed one by one.
“Democrats and their political base cannot deal with the fact that the American people elected President Trump,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) said Thursday on the Senate floor. “And so they’re dragging out every confirmation in retaliation.”
The rules change is the latest instance of the majority party using the nuclear option to make it easier to confirm nominees without the consent of the minority. Senate Democrats changed the rules in 2013 to allow most nominees to be confirmed with a simple majority rather than 60 votes. Senate Republicans did the same for Supreme Court nominees in 2017 when they held the majority. The also reduced debate time for most nominees in 2019.
Some Democrats said they agreed that the nominations process was broken. But they said they had stalled Trump’s nominees becausethey believe they are “historically bad.”
Democrats argued that they tried to negotiate with Republicans last month to confirm more nominees in exchange for the Trump administration releasing some funding that it had held up. But Trump torpedoed the deal, encouraging Republicans to go home for their summer break and telling Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) on social media to “GO TO HELL!”…
“Thune Moves to Speed Trump Nominees Past Democratic Blockade”
NYT:
Republicans took the first step on Monday toward changing the Senate’s rules to speed the confirmations of Trump administration nominees being slowed by Democratic opposition, touching off the latest in a yearslong tit for tat between the two parties that has weakened the filibuster.
The move is a response to Democrats’ refusal to allow President Trump’s nominees to be considered, which has slowed their confirmations and frustrated the president. But its consequences will reach beyond Mr. Trump’s tenure, effectively whittling down the ability of the minority to register any opposition to executive branch nominees below the cabinet level.
Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, made the first move on Monday by introducing a resolution that would group 48 of Mr. Trump’s nominees together to allow them to be considered and voted on as a group. That will queue up a complex series of floor votes this week and next that, if successful, would create new Senate precedents meant to help Republicans clear a growing backlog of nominees.
Republicans, who hold 53 seats, will try to muscle through the rules change using a simple majority, a tactic known as “going nuclear,” in part because of the charged partisan cloud it can leave over an institution that once prided itself on operating according to consensus.
t is the latest change to chip away at longstanding Senate precedent in the face of an increasingly polarized political environment.
Speaking on the Senate floor, Mr. Thune framed the rules change as a necessary response to what he framed as an unprecedented Democratic blockade against fast confirmation of any of Mr. Trump’s nominees, including lower-level picks that have traditionally been confirmed by voice votes or by unanimous consent.
Democrats, staunchly opposed to Mr. Trump’s efforts to reshape the executive branch and insisting more attention be paid to nominees they say are unqualified, have insisted on formal votes for each person, delaying approval of the president’s picks for dozens of jobs….
Changes to the Senate’s precedents, which govern how the chamber works, are supposed to require the approval of 67 senators, a barrier meant to make them more difficult to adopt. In using what is known as the nuclear option, members of the majority party instead attempt to take an action that has never been allowed before and then hold a number of procedural votes to overrule any objection by the minority and proceed, thus setting a new precedent that replaces what has been done in the past.
Democrats used the tactic in 2013 to lower the vote threshold on most nominees to a simple majority rather than 60 votes, a response to Senate Republicans systematically blocking a series of Obama administration judicial appointees.
Republicans then retaliated in 2017 to lower the threshold for Supreme Court nominees, allowing Mr. Trump to install three justices during his first term….
White House and Allies Blocking GAO Inquiries
A federal watchdog has opened dozens of investigations to determine if President Trump and his top aides have illegally withheld billions of dollars in congressionally approved funds.
Now, Republican lawmakers are working alongside the White House to stymie those inquiries and the officials conducting them, in a move that could help Mr. Trump seize more control over the nation’s budget.
The attacks target the Government Accountability Office, a roughly century-old agency formed to help Congress keep track of federal spending. The legislative office primarily produces detailed reports on ways that Washington can save money, sometimes rankling administrations that are not so keen about its allegations of waste.
But oversight officials have recently found themselves in a direct and highly unusual confrontation with the White House over the power of the purse.
“Crypto Industry Reaches Milestone With Passage of First Major Bill”
NYT: “The big bipartisan votes on the legislation reflected the industry’s success in cultivating powerful allies in government. Crypto firms financed a network of super PACs that spent more than $130 million backing pro-crypto candidates in the 2024 election.”
“This Year’s Election Bills Focus On Citizenship, Ranked Choice Voting”
NCSL’s election bill roundup notes the shift of this year’s crop:
With most legislatures having adjourned, the number of election bills introduced was 3,160, with 331 of them enacted into law across 43 states, according to NCSL tracking. Although this is a significant increase from the 2,017 bills NCSL tracked at the same point in the 2024 session, the number of enactments last year—218—was only slightly off this year’s count. It’s common to see an increase in election-related legislation following a presidential election, and this has certainly proved true in 2025.
With election bills introduced on a wide range of subjects, some notable trends and consistently popular topics came to the fore. Among a range of enactment trends, citizenship and voter identification continued their 2024 resurgence as areas of high legislative interest, bans on ranked-choice voting continue to increase, and the standardization of election dates stood out.
“Recovering from Rucho: How States Can Create National Partisan Fairness”
Jamie Piltch and Aaron Goldzimer have a new piece in the Wash. U. L. Rev. Online:
Rucho v. Common Cause and the failure to pass H.R. 1 have left national gerrymandering reform on life support. At present, however, states committed to creating fair maps limit themselves to considering their own political makeup when doing so. This internal approach risks the possibility that states committed to fairness subvert that value, as their refusal to consider national political data and other states’ maps may lock in an unfair map nationwide if other states gerrymander. This internal focus therefore also creates the possibility that reform-minded states fail to protect their voters’ interests in Congress.
This Essay proposes a novel path forward: a new redistricting criterion that allows states to prioritize national partisan fairness, rather than statewide fairness. Federalisms new and old justify this new criterion on a theoretical basis, while the seeming impossibility of national reform in Congress or federal courts justifies it on a practical one. The Essay explains how the consideration of other states’ maps would allow states to make the national Congressional map fair on net and walks through the mechanics necessary for this criterion’s implementation.
As the authors note, this really works only if a state draws congressional lines after most other states with sizable populations are done, and I’m skeptical that the race to be last would be feasible in a world with mid-decade redistricting possibility. (Or, if feasible, that it wouldn’t have unanticipated consequences of its own.) Which means I still think national legislation makes the most sense problem of national scale. But if, as they say, national legislation isn’t available . . . .
“Minnesota assassination prompts many lawmakers to wonder: Is service worth the danger?”
From the Alabama Reflector, with the subhead based on a Brennan Center report:
Nearly 9 in 10 state lawmakers reported facing insults and 4 in 10 facing harassment and threats.
And these threats aren’t evenly distributed:
Women were three to four times more likely than men to experience abuse related to their gender, according to the report. And people of color were more than three times as likely as white officeholders to endure race-based abuse.
“Hawaiʻi Senator Didn’t Disclose Possible Conflict Of Interest Before Voting”
From the Honolulu City Beat article:
Donovan Dela Cruz voted four times in favor of passing a bill designed to protect māmaki tea, even though he owns a māmaki tea business.
. . .
The Senate’s rules require that members cannot vote on legislation if there is “a direct financial interest” in the legislation, defined as affecting the legislator’s “personal business, property or financial interest.”
Issacharoff and Muller, “Relocating Nationwide Injunctions”
Earlier this year, I wrote about how potential reform over the “universal” or
“nationwide” injunction might affect a set of election law cases. The Supreme Court’s recent oral argument in Trump v. CASA has brought the debate about nationwide injunctions (and related concerns about forum shopping) in the federal courts to the fore.
Sam Issacharoff and I have co-authored a piece in Just Security, “Relocating Nationwide Injunctions.” Here’s how it opens:
Last month’s argument in Trump v. CASA provided the Supreme Court with its latest confrontation with nationwide injunctions. The underlying case challenges an executive order aimed at eliminating birthright citizenship. But the issue before the Court concerns whether a single federal district court may stop the enforcement of an executive order on a nationwide basis while litigation is pending. Nationwide injunctions raise many difficult questions, including the potential mismatch between the litigants before a court and the scope of relief sought. But they also heighten concerns about forum shopping to find a single sympathetic judge. We believe that the concern about plaintiffs seeking an outlier court can be addressed relatively simply.
What if there were some national judicial body with the authority to look at any case seeking a nationwide injunction and decide where a suitable forum might lie? We argue that such a body already exists, although it is thought of more as a home for mass torts and other forms of complex litigation, rather than as reconciling competing claims to a proper forum for nationwide injunctive cases against the executive—the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation.
“Ethics legislation stalls in Springfield as Senate president tries ‘brazen’ move that would have helped his election case”
In the closing hours of the Illinois General Assembly’s spring session, Senate President Don Harmon tried to pass legislation that would have wiped clean a potential multimillion-dollar fine against his political campaign committee for violating election finance laws he championed years ago.
Harmon’s move came against the backdrop of the former Illinois House speaker’s upcoming sentencing for corruption and abuse of power and almost instantly created a bipartisan legislative controversy that resulted in the bill never getting called for a vote.
The Oak Park Democrat’s maneuver, characterized by critics as “brazen” and self-serving, also raises anew questions about how seriously political leaders are trying to improve ethical standards in a state government the electorate already holds in low regard.
Blowback to Harmon’s action, particularly from inside the House Democratic caucus, was so severe it derailed an entire package of new election measures that would have required severe warnings about penalties for noncitizen voting, mandated curbside voting access for the disabled, broadened the ability of voters to cast ballots in centralized locations and provided more detailed public information about voting results.
“This is a terrible look,” said state Rep. Kelly Cassidy, a Chicago Democrat who recalled being one of several who spoke out in a closed-door House Democratic caucus meeting. “I don’t recommend that anybody in our caucus take a vote like that. There was not a single person in that caucus that could defend that vote. … There was a visceral reaction to it in caucus — both to the substance of it and the lack of forewarning.”