The United States Senate has become the place where pro-life bills and other good laws 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 don’t see those policies implemented. And the hidden culprit, which many are unaware of, is the filibuster.
For this reason, much of the blame lies with Aaron Burr. Although he is most famous for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804, he left another mark on American politics by giving us – perhaps unintentionally – the filibuster.
Dueling disappeared in the 1860s. Now is the time to bury the filibuster, or at least weaken it.
A year after firing 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 interrupted so that the bill could go to the floor for a vote.
By eliminating the rule, the Senate created the possibility of unlimited debate, which gave rise to the filibuster, which allowed senators from the minority party to block votes by taking the floor and talking, non-stop, for hours on end, about anything they could think of.
Famous filibusters in history include South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes in 1957 to block the Civil Rights Act, and Texas Senator Ted Cruz in 2013, who spoke for more than 23 hours in an effort to pressure Congress to defund the Affordable Care Act.
In 1917, the Senate devised the cloture rule, which ended debate on a bill if two-thirds of the senators present agreed to proceed to a vote. The threshold was lowered to three-fifths (or 60 votes) in 1975.
Any senator who is dissatisfied with a bill can now call a filibuster and no one has to stand up and say a word. When a cloture vote is finally called and 60 votes are not obtained (which is usually the case), the bill dies.
The silent filibuster has an impressive track record of killing many big bills. In my area 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 of gestation from the horror of a dismemberment abortion. But it was never put to a vote because the closing vote was 54-42.
In January 2025, the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, intended to save the lives of newborns who survive an abortion, never made it past the failed 52-47 cloture vote.
These were life-saving bills that were never even voted on.
In order to secure judicial nominees for the federal courts to which the President of the United States has appointed them, the filibuster was eliminated for district and appellate court judges in 2013, and for Supreme Court justices in 2017. Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett were confirmed by a simple majority vote: 54-45 for Gorsuch; 50-48 for Kavanaugh; 52-48 for Barrett.
Whichever party holds majority power in the Senate usually at least flirts with the idea of eliminating the filibuster. It’s time, right now, for Republicans to end the flirting and obstructionism.
Eliminating the filibuster—or at least changing it to a “talking filibuster” so that a senator who wants to prolong the debate actually has to debate, as I suggested to my supporters in an action alert in January—will return power to American voters.
And they will feel it, because they will finally see the policies that motivated them to vote in the first place become law.
Many Americans work hard to elect candidates who represent their values and promise to fight for specific policies that protect and promote those values.
And voters know when their candidate wins and when their party wins a majority in Congress.
But then how many understand the filibuster? How many voters realize that Congress’s failure to enact those policies is not due to a lack of trying, but rather a lack of that elusive 60-vote majority?
And if they don’t understand that, what are voters to conclude?
They become disillusioned with their candidate, with their party, with Congress, and – worst of all – with the very notion of voting. They foster division within the party and also demoralize other voters.
All because of a rule they didn’t even know.
Of course, that’s not the only thing demoralizing voters. In fact, there are some lazy, ineffective and disengaged members of Congress.
But eliminating or strictly limiting the filibuster will significantly improve the situation. A win will feel like a win. Having a majority in Congress will seem to mean something. And voters will be more motivated to preserve and increase those majorities in future (and current) elections.
Frank Pavone is national director of Priests for Life and national pastoral director of Rachel’s Vineyard Ministries and the No More Silence Awareness Campaign.
