Caving To Pressure, Senate Republicans Threaten To Nuke The Filibuster

End the shutdown, commit political suicide.

Please support this work by becoming a paying subscriber. This newsletter is free and will always remain free, but it still takes time and effort to produce. Your support means everything to me. For just $5 a month or $50 a year (a 17% discount!), you can keep the Opinionated Ogre going. Thank you!

Today is Tuesday, October 21, 2025 and the Republican Party continues to be completely fucked. Smiles, everyone! Smiles!

Because they had no plan other than, “Fuck you, Democrats!”, Republicans walked into a funding fight with no real exit strategy. For some insane reason, they believed they had the stronger message. They really did not. “We love firing government employees, fucking over blue states, and refusing to give tens of millions of people back their healthcare!” is the Cybertruck of political messaging minus the exploding battery.

Oh wait, we’ve reached the exploding battery part:

Three weeks into shutdown gridlock, some Senate Republicans are expressing openness to a controversial solution: nuking the filibuster.

“I know that’s being discussed,” Sen. Susan Collins, the chair of the Appropriations Committee, told NOTUS. “I am a strong supporter of the filibuster, but obviously I’ll look at any plan that anyone puts out in order to reopen the government.”

Senate Republican leadership is not into this idea, but an increasingly vocal and growing number of Republicans are pushing for it.

What’s happening here? A few things. The massive No Kings rally on Saturday has the GOP rattled. They were assured it was going to flop or be violent or no one would notice. Instead, over 7 million people showed up and the entire world saw a peaceful protest…against Trump and his entire party.

That’s 2 million more than showed up in June and getting awfully close to that critical 3.5%. That would be the historic threshold where 3.5% of the population engages in protest/civil disobedience and governments fall.

At the same time, Republicans are running out of track for the Trump Train. This week and next, millions of Americans are going to get letters from their insurance companies. These letters will explain how much more expensive their premiums are going to be without the ACA subsidies that are expiring. Social media will be flooded with enraged Americans who will demand those subsidies back, and even more Americans pointing the finger at the party refusing to renew them.

Hint: It’s Republicans. Republicans are refusing to renew them.

The easy way out would be just to restore the ACA subsidies and Medicaid funding. Republicans will still get 90% of their cruel budget passed and take the big W for fucking the country. But they can’t DO that because compromise is weakness and fascism will never compromise blablabla.

Remember, the regime’s illusion of total power has to be maintained at all times because without it, everything falls apart.

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

But why won’t Republicans flex their muscle and do away with the filibuster? They’re all about power and abusing it, right? Well, as I keep pointing out, Republicans are not convinced that Donald Trump can seal the deal on his authoritarian takeover:

Removing the filibuster has long made Republican senators queasy. While all senators acknowledge it would be easier to pass bills with a 51-vote threshold versus needing 60 votes to move legislation, Republicans are well aware Democrats would use a simple-majority for bills if they retake the majority.

“Bad idea,” Thune told reporters of getting rid of the filibuster as he walked into his office Monday evening.

…

Speaker Mike Johnson has been more careful, arguing in a press conference earlier this month that he would be “deeply concerned” if Democrats used a diminished 51-vote threshold to turn the U.S. “into a communist country.”

I cannot stress this enough: This is not what a fascist regime convinced it is winning acts like. Vladimir Putin does not give a flying fuck about what the opposition party will do “if they win” the next election. Viktor Orban doesn’t give a shit if the rules would give the opposition party the chance to remake the country. Xi Jinping doesn’t lose a moment of sleep wondering if he’s making a mistake by setting up a system that will allow his successor to move China in a way he wouldn’t like.

But Republicans are extremely concerned about this.

Again, the filibuster is the only thing keeping their party from extinction. A new Voting Rights Act alone would be a death sentence. The day the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court announce they’re taking the new law under review, Democrats would announce that they’re expanding the Court by 5 seats and, gee, are you SURE you want to review that law, Chief Justice John Roberts?

So, yes, Republicans are acutely aware the filibuster is all that stands between them and oblivion in a single election cycle. If they really thought they would never have to face another real election, they wouldn’t give a shit. They would just nuke it and pass whatever budget they want. They would outlaw abortion nationwide. They would make contraception illegal. They would criminalize homosexuality and transgender people. They would make it illegal to speak any language except English. It wouldn’t matter that the public would despise them because who cares? Elections don’t matter anymore!

But they clearly do matter and Republicans are very much convinced they will not be in power much longer. As badly as they want to load that gun and pull the trigger, they know THEY KNOW, deep in their shriveled little hearts, that soon it will not be THEIR finger on the trigger. And while they’re a long way from being able to pass laws to fully cement their power, Democrats can easily pass just two or three to cement theirs.

That’s what happens when you turn your party into a minority party cesspit of white nationalism and fascism that can only win by rigging elections and gerrymandering. If elections become free and fair, really free and fair, you lose everything. That is what Mike Johnson and John Thune fear above all else and why they’ll resist nuking the filibuster. The end of the filibuster is the end of the Republican Party.

The problem, of course, is that Donald Trump doesn’t give the tiniest of shits about the GOP. He wants what HE wants and who cares what the consequences are later? That means eventually, Trump will almost certainly order Senate Republicans to end the filibuster and end the shutdown. Then Thune and his party of craven cowards will either have to obey their god emperor and destroy their party, or save themselves and risk his wrath.

Or, Senate Republicans could finally negotiate and end the shutdown like adults, which would preserve their party and let them take the brunt of the blame instead of their beloved master in the White House. They may even come out with a bump in popularity for working to preserve healthcare for millions of their own voters. Weird to think Republicans actually doing something to help their base…

But all of this is in the future. Hopefully, the not-too-distant future as the shutdown is set to begin its fourth week on Wednesday. A lot of people are hurting, the fallout from the shutdown is spreading and impacting the economy in increasingly damaging ways, and with the economy already collapsing, this can easily push it into a freefall.

Republicans keep talking about how this is going to go on until Thanksgiving or after, but that’s a bluff and/or a desperate bid to keep the House from reopening so they can’t vote to release the Epstein Files. But in reality, time is almost up for the GOP. The question now is what will they do to avoid the doom of their own design speeding towards them at high speed? Watch this space.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

Fascism hates organized protests. Over 7 million of us showed up, and the fascists are afraid. They fear US. Keep the fascists afraid by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave has begun. There are 13 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.