President Donald Trump urged Senate Republicans on Thursday night to use the so-called nuclear option to abolish the filibuster and reopen the federal government without Democratic votes, a demand that split his own party within hours. In a late-night post on Truth Social, Trump wrote that it was time for Republicans to play their “TRUMP CARD” and “get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW!” The post landed as the shutdown entered its second month, with the Senate having repeatedly failed to advance a short-term funding bill and with millions of Americans feeling the effects of a funding lapse that began on 1 October.
The reaction from Republican leaders was swift, and it was not the endorsement Trump appeared to be seeking. House Speaker Mike Johnson, asked about the post at his Friday press conference, warned against scrapping the filibuster and said the decision was not his to make in any case. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, through a spokesperson, said his position on the importance of the legislative filibuster was unchanged. The split exposed a fault line that has run through the Senate for years: the party in power is tempted by majority rule in the moment, and haunted by what the other party would do with the same power later.
Trump’s argument, as he laid it out in the post, was blunt. He said Republicans were in power, that Democrats would abolish the filibuster on their first day back in control regardless of what Republicans did now, and that ending the rule immediately would end what he called a ridiculous and country-destroying shutdown. The logic is simple arithmetic. Republicans hold 53 Senate seats. Most legislation needs 60 votes to overcome a filibuster and proceed to a final vote. Without Democratic help, the funding bill cannot move — unless the rule itself is changed by a simple majority, which is what the nuclear option means.
What the Senate filibuster nuclear option would actually change
The filibuster is not a law. It is a Senate practice, rooted in the chamber’s tradition of unlimited debate, under which a minority can block a bill by refusing to end debate unless 60 senators vote for cloture. The nuclear option is the procedural manoeuvre by which a Senate majority changes that practice with 51 votes, overruling the chamber’s presiding officer and setting a new precedent. The name comes from the scale of the explosion it would set off in Senate norms, not from any weapon. It has been used before, but only for nominations, never for ordinary legislation.
In 2013, Democrats led by Harry Reid used the nuclear option to end the filibuster for most presidential nominations, leaving the Supreme Court exception in place. In 2017, Republicans led by Mitch McConnell extended it to Supreme Court nominations. Both moves were denounced at the time as institutional vandalism by the party out of power, and both were later used by the other side exactly as predicted. That history is why the legislative filibuster has survived so long despite repeated frustration: every majority knows that the rule it breaks today will be broken against it tomorrow, on bills it opposes far more than it wants the bill in front of it now.
Applied to the current shutdown, the nuclear option would let the Republican majority pass the House-approved continuing resolution — a short-term bill funding the government at current levels through 21 November — with 51 votes. The bill has failed to advance 13 times since 19 September. The most recent vote fell 55 to 45, five votes short of the 60 needed, with only three members of the Democratic caucus voting with Republicans. One Republican, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted against the measure. The numbers explain both Trump’s frustration and his leaders’ caution: the votes to change the rule may be even harder to find than the votes to pass the bill.
Why Johnson warned against ending the filibuster
Johnson’s Friday remarks were careful, but their direction was unmistakable. He said the filibuster was a Senate matter on which he had no say, and then he said what he thought about it anyway. The filibuster, he said, has traditionally been viewed as a very important safeguard. He added a version of the golden-rule argument that has defined this debate for a generation: if the shoe were on the other foot, Republicans would not like it. If Republicans abolished the rule now, he warned, Democrats would use a simple-majority standard in the future to pass progressive policies while sidelining the Republican minority.
Johnson also framed Trump’s post as an expression of frustration rather than a formal instruction, saying he interpreted it as the president venting about a standoff that has now dragged on for a month. That reading gave Republican leaders room to disagree with the president without openly defying him. It also reflected the political reality Johnson faces in the House, where he has been turning up pressure on Democrats as unease grows within his own conference about a shutdown with no visible end. The House has already passed its funding bill. The impasse is in the Senate, and Johnson cannot fix the Senate’s rules from the Speaker’s chair.
Thune’s response was even shorter, and in its way more decisive. His spokesperson, Ryan Wrasse, said the majority leader’s position on the importance of the legislative filibuster was unchanged. Thune has defended the filibuster for years, including in his first floor speech as leader of the current Congress, in which he described it as a tool that keeps the Senate the Senate — a chamber designed to slow down legislation, force compromise and protect the minority from the passions of a bare majority. Nothing in the current crisis, his office signalled, had changed that view.
The shutdown fight behind the filibuster argument
The filibuster debate cannot be understood without the dispute it is blocking. Democrats have refused to advance the House-passed continuing resolution unless Republicans agree to extend premium tax credits under the Affordable Care Act, subsidies that help lower- and middle-income families afford health insurance and that are set to expire at the end of the year. Democrats argue that letting the subsidies lapse would raise premiums sharply for millions of people, and that a funding bill is the only leverage they have to force action before the deadline.
Republicans answer that the funding bill should be clean — a straightforward extension of current spending while negotiations continue — and that health care policy should be debated separately, not attached to a bill whose only job is to keep the government open. They point out that the same bill has been blocked more than a dozen times, and they accuse Democrats of choosing a shutdown over a temporary funding measure. Democrats answer that Republicans control the White House and both chambers of Congress, and that a majority that cannot govern without minority votes is asking the minority to surrender its only bargaining power for nothing in return.
Both characterisations contain elements of truth, which is why the standoff has lasted a month. The continuing resolution is, on its face, a routine instrument. The subsidies question is, on its face, a major policy decision with consequences for millions of households. Tying the two together is a political choice by both sides: Democrats chose to make the subsidies a condition of reopening the government, and Republicans chose to refuse that condition rather than negotiate it under shutdown pressure. The filibuster is the mechanism that makes both choices stick, because it gives the minority a veto that a simple majority cannot override without changing the rules of the game.
What happens next in the Senate
For now, the practical path to reopening the government remains the one Thune has pursued since the shutdown began: finding five more Democratic votes. At the current tallies, five additional members of the Democratic caucus would be needed to reach 60, assuming the Republican conference holds together. That is a smaller number than it was at the start of the shutdown, when almost the entire Democratic caucus voted as a bloc, but it is still a significant ask. The three Democrats who have already crossed over have done so at political cost, and their colleagues have shown little appetite for following them while the subsidies question remains unanswered.
The nuclear option, by contrast, would require a majority of Republicans to vote to change Senate rules — a step many of them have resisted for the same reason Johnson articulated. Senators who have spent their careers in the minority, or who expect to be there again, tend to value the filibuster more than senators who have only known majority power. Collins and Murkowski, among others, have warned in the past about the long-term costs of gutting the rule. There is no public evidence that 51 Republican votes exist to abolish the legislative filibuster, and Thune’s statement suggests the leadership is not even counting them.
That leaves the shutdown where it has been for weeks: dependent on negotiation, not procedure. The two sides could agree on a subsidies deal, or on a vote on subsidies legislation at a fixed date, or on a shorter funding extension that buys time for talks. Any of those outcomes would require one side to move first, and neither has been willing to do so while blaming the other for the consequences. The consequences, meanwhile, keep accumulating — missed paychecks for federal workers, delayed benefits, strained airports, and a food assistance programme whose November payments are now the subject of a separate federal court fight.
Trump’s intervention may still matter, even if the nuclear option goes nowhere. By demanding the most drastic available step, he raised the pressure on Senate Democrats to provide the votes for reopening, and on his own party’s leaders to find an exit. By refusing that step, Johnson and Thune preserved a Senate institution that both parties have, at different moments, claimed to cherish and tried to destroy. The tension between those two impulses — the urge to win now and the fear of losing later — is the oldest story in the Senate. This week, it played out in public, in a single day, between a president and the leaders of his own party.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from Fox News via Attractions Las Vegas, The Well News and FrankNez Media.
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