Pictured is John Curtis, a United States Senator from Utah. His recent opinion column in The Wall Street Journal is reproduced below, in its entirety. I am told that even non-subscribers should be able to click this link, and then read Curtis' commentary online, but if that doesn't work, what I provide below does give you Curtis' argument, in full (emphasis added).
This is my second recent blog posting on the topic of the filibuster. A month or so ago, I featured the comments of a former Senator, Ben Sasse.
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It protects the rights of the minority in the Senate—even when it’s a minority of one.
By John Curtis
July 30, 2026
The debate over the filibuster is often misunderstood. Most people think it is about a rule. It isn’t. It is about the absence of a rule. When the Senate was established, the Constitution gave it the authority to create its own rules. The Senate chose not to give itself a mechanism to end debate. Unlimited debate wasn’t an accident or a loophole. It was simply how the Senate operated.
This original design assumed a very different environment from today’s. There were no established political parties as we now know them. No modern leadership structure. Very little media. No mass communication. It was a small group of people sitting in a room, working through issues, knowing that if they wanted to act, they had to reach agreement.
In that setting, if no one could force the end of debate, the only way forward was to work it out. Cloture, which is what we usually mean when we talk about the filibuster today, came much later in the Senate’s history. Eventually the chamber grew, and unlimited debate threatened to bring all business to a permanent halt. While cloture was adopted in 1917 to limit debate, its current 60-vote threshold protects the Senate’s original design in the face of today’s realities by requiring a broad number of members to “work through issues” before passing bills.
This tradition contributed to the Senate’s reputation as the world’s greatest deliberative body. Not because senators speak longer, but because no one can be easily ignored. The structure forces engagement. It requires listening. It pushes ideas to be tested beyond a simple majority. Because of that, individual senators hold real power. This is an important distinction between the Senate and the House.
In the House, power is centralized. Leadership controls the flow of legislation, the terms of debate and often the outcome. Even senior members can have limited influence. I served there and saw how difficult it is for an individual member to shape major legislation.
The Senate operates differently. Because debate isn’t easily cut off, individual senators can’t be dismissed in the same way. A freshman senator can have more practical influence than a long-serving representative. Not because of personality or seniority, but because of how the system is built.
People often picture the filibuster as one senator standing and speaking for hours. That image is incomplete. Senate rules allow senators many opportunities to speak, and debate can continue through a rotation of speakers. It is less about endurance and more about the inability to force a conclusion without broad agreement.
The 60-vote threshold is usually described as protecting the minority party. That framing misses the bigger picture. The minority isn’t just a party. It can be any senator, on any issue, at any time, whose view doesn’t align with the majority. That happens more often than people might think. A senator in the majority may disagree with his own leadership. Under the current structure, that senator can’t easily be overruled and pushed aside.
It protects independence, not just party position. The Senate’s practice of holds is a good example. Any senator can place a hold on legislation. Overcoming that objection often requires 60 votes, which can be difficult to assemble. That gives individual senators the ability to stop or slow a bill—a significant amount of influence for one person.
If the threshold moves to 50 votes from 60, that balance changes. The Senate begins to function more like the House. Individual members lose their ability to stop a bill. Leadership gains the ability to move legislation with a simple majority.
It wouldn’t stop there. If leadership only needs 51 votes, it will organize the Senate accordingly. A rules structure similar to the House would likely follow. That means more control for leaders over what comes to the floor, how it is debated and whether amendments are allowed.
I saw this repeatedly in the House. Committees were bypassed. Debate was limited. Bills were brought forward quickly based on leadership decisions rather than member input. In seven years in the House, I didn’t have a single meaningful opportunity to influence major legislation. In the Senate, and as a freshman, I found myself in the thick of every major piece of legislation.
The 60-vote threshold also plays a role beyond day-to-day legislation. It acts as a check on structural and institutional changes. Decisions on matters such as District of Columbia statehood, federal election law and internal Senate rules aren’t routine policy questions. They shape the system itself. Requiring broader agreement before making those changes adds stability. Without that threshold, those decisions can be made by a simple majority and just as easily reversed by the next. At that point, the Senate would become unrecognizable to our Founders. It would move from a body that requires agreement to one that runs on majority control.
So, the question isn’t simply whether more legislation would pass. It is whether prudence would still be required in lawmaking, whether legislation passed in one Congress would remain law in the next.
Under no circumstance will I support any effort to end or alter the filibuster, as any party that does so wouldn’t be guaranteed survival. Their agenda would be guaranteed death come the next majority.
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What I would like to highlight, in Curtis' commentary, is his observation that both our House and Senate are ever more subservient (in terms of decision-making) to the "leadership" of the two political parties that now seem to be the only political realities that have any meaning for many Americans.
This situation is profoundly contrary to the system envisioned in our Constitution. In its original design, our government was clearly composed of elected "representatives," who each, individually, took direction from (and whose jobs were subject to control by) a discrete number of citizens who lived in a specific geographic "district." The complexity and variegated nature of the nation was recognized in this system of political accountability, and as both Sasse and Curtis note, this emphasized the need for "compromise," for discussion and then decisions, those decisions representing "deals" between the many different representatives, coming from all over the nation.
The nation was not, then, considered to be either "Red" or "Blue," and citizens in California did not receive massive numbers of fundraising appeals from those representing completely different communities in different states, where the political issues of most importance were absolutely different from the kind of issues that preoccupied those in California. Most of Utah has little in common with Santa Cruz, but if we really only have two choices, politically speaking, then it certainly does make sense for a Senator from Utah to appeal to those "Republicans" who live here, who would, presumably, think that the Utah Republican's political fortunes were of importance to all Republicans, everywhere. Same on the "Democratic Party" side, too, of course.
Our political parties are subservient to corporations and wealthy individuals, and our individual "representatives," whether Democrat or Republican, currently have to conform to what "the Party" says. Same thing is true in state government, too - at least in a place like California. I'm not sure about places like Alaska and Utah.
Are we really prepared to go along with the current system, and to cast aside, in perpetuity, the system contemplated in the Constitution? I'm not a fan of our "party-based" politics, and considering the issue of the filibuster is just one (and a pretty minor) way to begin understanding what has actually happened to us, politically.
I, personally, continue to think that the system laid out in the Constitution is a better bet than what we've got now. When the current president is no longer around, we are all going to have an opportunity either to continue the current "party-based" system of governance, or to figure out how we can restore what I continue to call "democratic (small-d) self-government."
A government that works according to what the Constitution provides is not going to happen without what amounts to a kind of political "revolution." But, hey, we are not allergic to "revolutions," are we, here in the United States of America, 250 years after July 4, 1776?
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