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this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2026
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Not voting (in your election)
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Yes. The framing of this post is pure right-wing propaganda.
Democrats do not block movement left. They work under constraints that essentially require 60 Dem votes in the senate to pass milestone reforms.
The last time they had that was 2009. They had it for fewer than 100 days, and in that time they passed the ACA.
That's a false framing. They don't need 60 votes, they need a simple majority and the balls to actually govern. The filibuster as minimum for passage is a new phenomenon, not historic, and it certainly isn't "the nuclear option" like both parties constantly claim it to be. It would mean that democratically elected representatives chosen as the majority get to govern. Real shocker, I know.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this, but if you're saying it ever used to be easy to end debate and force a vote in the senate, that is wrong.
I will concede that senate productivity is at a low, and obstructionism at a high point, but the current abuses of process are independent of the tradition of extended debate in the senate.
A bare majority could abolish or bypass any filibuster, but the procedure for doing so (rather than from formal rules changes) certainly is a nuclear-option route, which is why it's been used very narrowly (like for judicial nominations). In a senate that structurally makes Republicans over-represented, such that they can get 53% of the senate seats with 47% of the votes, I'd be careful about giving up the filibuster. Do you think the SAVE Act would currently be held up in the senate without the modern cloture rule?
If you want a real argument, it is not going to be that ending the filibuster is easy. Procedurally, the mechanism is straightforward, but that's not the point. The point is that anyone who can think more than 2 years into the future and imagine the other side having a future senate majority should be wary of doing so, should be willing to concede it is a nuclear option, and should argue more honestly: that they think the majority should be willing to go nuclear to do it.
Also, dumping these sort of things would be extremely harmful if we ever somehow managed to kill the GOP and get an actual progressive party going. Because that new small party would never get anywhere and just grt rolled by the Conservative Dems.