Thanks to Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT), Ron Johnson (R-WI), Eric Schmitt (R-MO), and some other stalwart Senate Republicans, the SAVE America Act has at last made it to the chamber’s floor this week.
Those on Team America know the bill is a no-brainer, slam-dunk. Polls show super-majority support for it across party lines.
Of course, you can always count on Congress to place itself squarely between wildly popular common sense and the American people.
As is the all-too-usual case in Washington, the debate now is not over the bill’s merits, but the process of enacting it.
By now, you’ve no doubt heard at least something of the intricacies of a parliamentary maneuver called the talking filibuster.
When I began hearing this media description, having spent some substantial time as a dirty, money-grubbing lobbyist myself, I found it curious, as the filibuster has become a kind of shorthand for pronouncing legislation dead on arrival.
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To the extent that Real America is familiar with it, their mental image is likely “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” with a disheveled Jimmy Stewart flailing to-and-fro as he vainly tries to hold the Senate floor against the evil D.C. interests, while reading the Constitution, the Bible, the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, or even as an old teacher of mine used to joke, the Sears and Roebuck catalog.
But filibuster as a pronouncement of legislative death is predicated on another D.C. article of faith: to pass a bill in the Senate requires 60 votes. This is due to another parliamentary process known as cloture. Invoking cloture is the standard process for ending debate in the Senate. But it’s not the only one.
If every Senator desiring to speak about a question (the SAVE America Act in this case) is recognized by the presiding officer and does so twice, debate may be ended by a SIMPLE MAJORITY vote, as all Senators seeking recognition would have exhausted all their time. In shorthand, this is what the talking filibuster is referring to.
The irony is that it is not, in fact, a filibuster in the sense anyone actually thinks of it at all – it is a method, granted a very time-consuming and protracted one – to KILL a filibuster. A filibuster is the actual act of holding the floor, as typified by Stewart, or (in real life), more recently, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) against Obamacare about thirteen years ago. While not quite the same thing, as House rules are dramatically different, the leaders’ “magic minute,” in which Democrat House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY-08) held the House floor in 2025 against the Big Beautiful Bill for nearly nine hours, is a roughly similar lower-chamber tactic.
No wonder the misnomer – the last thing D.C. politicians generally want to do is their jobs, especially when they require something beyond the usual (or even better, minimal) effort. Obviously, among lawmakers, filibuster has a generally negative connotation in that it’s a delaying tactic, meant to inflict political, rhetorical, and whatever other types of non-physical pain it can, with the purpose of aborting (or negating) the legislative process.
So Senate party leaders have, over time, come to presume in general that a bill without 60 votes is dead. As we all know, politicians live to brag about what they have done. The threat of a filibuster, and the process of a talking filibuster required to kill the threat, has become much too daunting for them to consider. So they’ve retreated under the 60-vote justification.
And probably more times than not, all softball politician jokes and sarcasm aside, it is probably the correct call.
But given the turmoil that our elections have seen – not just through COVID and January 6 and the Georgia and Arizona and other attendant electoral controversies of the Trump era, but even back to Bush v. Gore – the election process in this current era has fully earned public distrust.
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If a time ever called for a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” moment, this is it. Only this time the “interests” opposing Mr. Smith come in the form of filibustering Democrats opposing clean elections – and America is rooting for breaking them. And as conservatives frequently find themselves saying these days, extraordinary measures such as the talking filibuster are what we voted for.
President Donald Trump, by promising no bill signings until this one is passed, as usual, is here for it. It’s high time for Senate Republicans, led by Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), as urged by Mike Lee and company, to step up.
America knows it’s hard. So what? DO YOUR JOBS.
Editor’s Note: The Democrats are doing everything in their power to undermine the integrity of our elections.
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