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.[1][2]
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.”[3]
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.”[3][4] 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.”[4]
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.”[5] 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.”[5]
How it would actually be done
Asked in October 2025 whether the Democrats could filibuster the abolition of the filibuster, Kiriakou explained that the question does not arise. “It’s a decision made solely by the majority leader. There doesn’t have to be a vote on it, because it’s not a law. It’s an internal rule.”[6]
He restated the Reid precedent as the warning that was ignored: Reid “wouldn’t listen to reason when people said, wait a minute, the Republicans are going to be able to force through their judges if you use the nuclear option now. No, no, it’s going to be fine. They’re never going to be in the majority ever again.” And then the Republicans took the Senate.[6][7]
Applied to Donald Trump’s demand that John Thune abolish the rule, the arithmetic runs the same way and against the same party: Trump “is going to get his budget for a year or two or even three maybe, but when the Democrats control the White House and the Senate — and you know it’s going to happen because it always does — the Democrats are going to be able to do anything they want.” Kiriakou’s verdict is that this is “an extraordinarily short-sighted pronouncement.”[7][8]
He doubted Thune would comply, and gave a reading of the man rather than of the politics: Thune “is not a big Trump fan. He’ll say the right things to keep the MAGA people off his back, but he’s not a big fan”, and he “has a better historical understanding of why the Senate needs to keep the filibuster. It’s to preserve the rights of the minority, and he knows that they’re going to be in the minority again.”[8]