The filibuster and Harry Reid's lesson
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The occasion was White House pressure on the Senate majority leader John Thune to break a filibuster over the Save America Act, including a demand for an old-fashioned talking filibuster, with Thune reporting that he did not have the votes even for that.

Kiriakou's assessment of Thune is approving, and delivered as a joke about scarcity: "John Thune is exhibiting something called, what's the name of it, leadership... I had to think about that because we haven't seen it anywhere in Washington for so long."

The institutional argument

The defence he mounts is about the body rather than the bill. Thune "is taking the long view here that if you want to maintain your power and authority, not just yours personally but the body's power and authority, then you're going to maintain the filibuster." The pressure is not partisan but structural: "of course Donald Trump wants to do away with the filibuster. Every president wants to do away with the filibuster so he can ram his projects through."

Reid

The cautionary case is Harry Reid's, and Kiriakou states the mechanism and the cost together: "if you do away with the filibuster, the other side's going to be back in power, probably sooner rather than later, and you're going to be screwed." Barack Obama "wanted so badly to force through his judicial nominees. And so, Harry Reid lifted the filibuster when it came to judicial nominees, and that's how we have all these right-wing crazy people on the Supreme Court. That was Harry Reid's fault. And John Thune doesn't want to make it worse."

See also

- Cancelling the 2026 midterms
- Donald Trump
- Barack Obama
