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chairman donald trump On Friday he made his strongest appeal yet to Senate Republicans to eliminate the filibuster rule and allow simple majority votes for the shutdown and most legislation, saying it would mean the GOP “will never lose a midterm and we will never lose a general election” in the near future.
Speaking in the Cabinet Room during a bilateral meeting and lunch with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán – a leader who has spent years dismantling his country’s democratic guardrails to the point of making it almost impossible. Fidesz TO LOSE POWER – Trump appeared confused about whether the Democratic victory in Tuesday’s off-year elections was the result of “lies” about his record on “affordability” when he was pressed on how to end the longest-running government shutdown in US history. In response, he told the assembled press that “the way to do it” was for Senate Republicans to exercise the so-called “nuclear option” to wrest the upper chamber. filibuster Rule.
He said, “I’m completely in favor of ending the filibuster, and within 10 minutes of the vote being held we’ll be back to work, and many other good things will happen. And it makes no sense that a Republican wouldn’t want to do that.”
As Orbán looked on admiringly, Trump also claimed that “only a stupid person” would be against usurping the last piece of power available to the minority party in Washington because the current Democratic minority is made up of “crazy people.”
He then introduced a list of partisan proposals he would press Congress to enact after the Senate eliminates the minority party’s ability to block legislation, including a national voter ID mandate and a ban on mail voting, which he falsely claimed is “corrupt” and rife with “fraud.”
Sending those bills to his desk, Trump said, would mean Republicans “will never lose” in next year’s midterms, adding that current polling shows his party is set to lose its House majority and possibly control of the Senate.
He also said that without the filibuster rule on the books, Republicans “would never lose the general election” because the GOP would have “made so many different things work for our people, for the people, for the country that it would be impossible to lose the election.”
Asked if his effort to eliminate the Senate filibuster meant he was unwilling to compromise with Democrats to end the nearly 40-day impasse over government funding, Trump responded that eliminating the filibuster would help the GOP end the impasse without any input from the opposition.
“If we end the filibuster, the country will be open within 10 minutes of that ending, because we will take the second vote, which is the opening of the country, and Republicans will vote to open the country,” he said.
He later said that bipartisanship “doesn’t work” and warned that maintaining the Senate supermajority requirement would keep the GOP “entangled with the Democrats” during which “little will be done for either party.”
The filibuster rule, which dates back to the 1806 amendment of the chamber’s standing rules under then-Vice President Aaron Burr, has frustrated presidents and congressional majorities of both parties because it has been used to prevent large portions of their political agendas from being enacted with a bare majority in each chamber, through a centuries-old quirk in parliamentary procedure that allows the minority party to block up-or-down votes on bills that are less than Can’t get less support. 60 senators.
Some progressive Democrats pushed to end the practice if Washington has unified control from 2021 to 2023, but that effort failed as several Democratic senators and the entire Republican minority in the chamber voted against it. Most of the Senate’s current Republican conference – including Majority Leader John Thune – still opposes the move despite Trump’s recent advocacy.
The president’s demand to remove one of the last remaining guardrails against unchecked GOP power in Washington comes just days after his party suffered devastating defeats in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races at the hands of voters who expressed anger over his administration’s failure to address rising prices as the cost of living continues to rise in the US.
Citing the laser-focused campaigns of New Jersey Governor-elect Mickey Sherrill and Virginia Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger, which were focused on “affordability” just a year after voters cited high prices as a reason for their return to the White House in the 2024 presidential election, Trump complained that Democrats’ focus on “affordability” was an “act of fraud.”
“Democrats are good at some things, cheating at the polls and deceiving people with facts that are not true,” Trump said. Trump then rattled off a list of baseless claims about this year’s Thanksgiving dinner staples and the prices of gasoline, which he falsely claimed was available to Americans at $2 a gallon.
He said, “Prices have gone down under the Trump administration, and they’ve gone down significantly… Gasoline has gone down significantly, and the other big thing is inflation has gone down significantly… We’ve done a very good job on groceries and affordability. The only problem is fake news. You guys don’t want to report it.”
“The reason I don’t want to talk about affordability is because everyone knows that under Trump it’s much less expensive than under Joe Biden and prices are way down.”