National Review Online
Friday, March 13, 2026
John Cornyn is a fine senator, and we wish him well in his bid for reelection. In the midst of
his hotly contested primary runoff against Ken Paxton, Cornyn argues in a New York Post op-ed for ditching the
filibuster’s 60-vote threshold and backing “whatever changes to Senate rules
that may prove necessary for us to get the SAVE America Act and homeland
security funding past the Democrats’ obstruction, through the Senate, and on
the president’s desk for his signature.”
Cornyn admits not only that this is an about-face, but
that it is a change for the worse: “For many years, I believed that if the US
Senate scrapped the filibuster, Texas and our nation would stand to lose more
than we would gain. My fellow conservatives and I have proudly used the 60-vote
threshold to protect the country from all sorts of bad ideas and dangerous
policies.” But, he argues, the battle is already lost, because Democrats intend
to break the rule once they return to power, so Republicans may as well wave
the white flag. “Process matters,” Cornyn writes, “but outcomes matter more.”
This is terribly short-sighted. Cornyn may feel he has to
take this position in order to blunt Paxton’s populist appeals and court the
endorsement of Donald Trump, who has long favored ending the filibuster.
Presidents often chafe at it, because it is most needed by the party out of
presidential power. But the Senate has its own responsibilities as an
institution — including defending its own traditional prerogatives. Senators
should have the self-respect to stand up for those.
Contra Senator Cornyn, process actually matters quite a
lot — not least because it affects outcomes. Nobody understands this better
than the left, which is why it has long loathed the filibuster and sought its
destruction. Regardless of whether the mechanism used to defang it is a rule
change or merely a change from existing practices, the end the left seeks is
the same: to enact laws without 60 votes for cloture in the Senate. That is
exactly what Cornyn now advises.
The core of Cornyn’s argument is that Democrats are
certain to end the filibuster when they next take power. Maybe so; surely, much
of their caucus would like to. But to claim that “Democrats, with their votes
and statements, have already dealt the filibuster a fatal blow” is false: the
rule held against their assault in 2021–22, preventing the enactment of much
mischief. Resisting that onslaught cost the party two Trump-state senators, one
of whom (Joe Manchin) was replaced by a Republican in a seat the Democrats won’t
soon get back.
That is a real political cost. The grim reality for
Democrats is that they can take and hold a majority in the Senate only by
winning seats in red and purple states. Only one Republican senator (Susan
Collins) remains in a state won by Kamala Harris, but Democrats need three more
seats to get to 51. In the six states that flipped from Joe Biden to Trump in
2024, Democrats already hold ten of the twelve Senate seats. Any Democratic
majority in the near future will be able to break the filibuster only with the
votes of senators outside of safe blue-state seats. They can be made to pay the
consequences for radicalism. After Harry Reid broke the judicial filibuster in
2013, Democrats lost nine Senate seats in 2014 — and they have recovered only
one of those seats since then, while losing the judiciary for a generation.
Republicans should neither relieve them of that cost nor repeat their error.
And for what? As we have previously editorialized, while the SAVE America
Act’s policy goals of preventing noncitizens from registering to vote and (as
the bill was more recently amended) requiring voter ID are laudable and long-standing policy commitments of ours, they are better
handled at the state level and would likely not produce dramatic results or
even be ready to implement in time for the midterm elections. In any event, the
bill’s merits are hardly dramatic enough to justify permanently stripping the
Senate’s defenses against far more radical and sweeping legislation. It is not
as if the narrow House Republican majority now has a fleet of major bills on
deck to follow this. Nor are such steps justified by a routine impasse over
funding a department — a lever that Republicans, too, find useful when in the
minority.
In fact, it is far from certain that there are enough
Republicans in the Senate who can be counted on to pass the SAVE America Act,
let alone who would support reworking Senate rules or procedures in order to
pass it. The purely political argument that Republicans need to break the
filibuster in order to show their demoralized voters that they can pass something
besides the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is therefore backwards: it would be even
more demoralizing to go through a public reversal of great and permanent
benefit to Democrats only to get nothing enacted. That may benefit activists
who want an excuse to promote primary challengers to incumbent Republican
senators, but it does nothing to serve either the country, the party, or
conservatism.
It is abandoning the filibuster, rather than defending
it, that constitutes unilateral disarmament. Senate Republicans should have the
courage to hold on to weapons they may need again.
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