The United States Senate has become the place where pro-life bills and other good legislation go to die.
The culprit is the filibuster, and among the many reasons now being discussed for ending or limiting it to a talking filibuster, one of the most compelling is this: The filibuster demoralizes voters.
Americans vote for certain policies, win elections, and then they don’t see the policies enacted. And the hidden culprit, about which many are unaware, is the filibuster.
For that, much of the blame goes to Aaron Burr. Though he is most infamous for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804, he left another imprint on U.S. politics by giving us – perhaps unintentionally – the filibuster.
Duels were done away with by the 1860s. Now it’s time to bury the filibuster, or at least weaken it.
A year after dispatching Hamilton, Burr was finishing his term as vice president when he suggested that the Senate eliminate a rule that allowed debate on a particular bill to be cut off so the bill could go to the floor for a vote.
By removing the rule, the Senate created the possibility for unlimited debate, giving rise to the filibuster, which allowed senators in the minority party to block votes by taking the floor and talking, non-stop, for hours on end, about anything that popped into their heads.
Famous filibusters in history include South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond speaking for 24 hours and 18 minutes in 1957 to block the Civil Rights Act and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in 2013 talking for more than 23 hours in an effort to pressure Congress to defund the Affordable Care Act.
In 1917, the Senate came up with the cloture rule, which ended debate over a bill if two-thirds of the senators present agreed to move on to a vote. The threshold was lowered to three-fifths – or 60 votes – in 1975.
Any senator unhappy with a bill now can call for a filibuster and no one has to get up and say a word. When a cloture vote is eventually called and fails to receive 60 votes – which is often the case – the bill dies.
The silent filibuster has an impressive record of killing many great bills. In my are of work, the fight against abortion, we saw in 2015 the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would have protected babies in the womb after 20 weeks’ gestation from the horror of a dismemberment abortion. But it never came up for a vote because the cloture vote was 54-42.
In January 2025, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act – aimed at saving the lives of newborns who live through an abortion – never made it past the failed cloture vote of 52-47.
These were life-saving bills that never even got as far as a vote.
In the interest of getting judicial nominees to the federal benches to which the president of the United States has appointed them, the filibuster was eliminated for district court and appellate judges in 2013, and for Supreme Court justices in 2017. Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were confirmed by simple majority votes – 54-45 for Gorsuch; 50-48 for Kavanaugh; 52-48 for Barrett.
Whichever party holds majority power in the Senate generally at least flirts with the idea of eliminating the filibuster. It’s time, right now, for the Republicans to end the flirtation and the filibuster.
Eliminating the filibuster – or at least changing it to a “talking filibuster” so that a senator who wants to prolong debate actually has to debate, as I suggested to my supporters in an action alert in January, will give power back to American voters.
And they will feel it, because they’ll finally see policies that motivated them to vote in the first place actually become law.
So many Americans work hard to elect candidates who represent their values, and promise to fight for specific policies protecting and advancing those values.
And the voters know when their candidate wins, and when their party wins the majority in Congress.
But then how many understand the filibuster? How many voters realize that the failure of Congress to enact those policies is not due to a lack of trying, but to a lack of that elusive 60-vote majority?
And if they don’t understand that, what are the voters to conclude?
They get disillusioned with their candidate, with their party, with the Congress, and – worst of all – with the very notion of voting. They foster division within the party, and demoralize other voters too.
All because of a rule that they didn’t even know about.
Now of course that’s not the only thing that demoralizes voters. There are in fact some lazy, ineffective, and less-than-committed members of Congress.
But eliminating or strictly limiting the filibuster will improve the situation significantly. A win will feel like a win. Having a majority in Congress will feel like it means something. And voters will be more motivated to preserve and increase those majorities in future elections — and in the present one.
Frank Pavone is national director of Priests for Life and the national pastoral director of Rachel’s Vineyard Ministries and the Silent No More Awareness Campaign.