The filibuster is here to stay, for now. And that’s posing a challenge to President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress confronting a wall of Republican opposition led by Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s “100%” focus on stopping their agenda. This week’s defeat of an ambitious elections bill showed how far lawmakers and advocates have come in focusing attention on the cumbersome Senate rules, in place for decades, that require 60 votes to advance most legislation. In a short while, they’ve lifted the filibuster out of the procedural backwaters into the political mainstream, changing senators’ minds and showing how the rules can and will be used to halt Biden’s goals. Yet the grueling work of unifying all 50 Democrats in the Senate around a strategy to change the filibuster is just beginning. It’s not just Sen. Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema the reformers will need to persuade to do away with the practice. Biden has been cool to filibuster changes, and as many as 10 Democratic senators have quietly expressed reservations, though their numbers appear to be diminishing as frustration mounts over Republican obstruction. “It wasn’t long ago the conventional wisdom was this was unthinkable,” said Tre Easton, a senior adviser at Battle Born Collective, a group advocating for change. “Now you see what a filibuster does to a Democratic agenda.” The downfall of the elections bill offers an inflection point, midway in Biden’s first year in the White House, as Democrats take stock of the limits of their narrow hold on Congress. While the outcome of a 50-50 vote on the elections bill mirrored the evenly split Senate’s partisan divide, those lawmakers and advocates seeking to change the filibuster actually saw progress in uniting Democrats around their priority bill. Just hours before the vote, Manchin notified Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer he would be on board. This after Manchin and Sinema met separately with Biden at the White House the night before and Schumer vowed to give Manchin’s proposed changes top billing. Winning over Manchin, the centrist Democrat from West Virginia, was the step forward advocates had hoped for. “Huge,” said Eli Zupnick, a spokesman for Fix Our Senate, another group seeking filibuster changes. The legislation, S.1, the For the People Act, is a unique test case for a filibuster overhaul because it carries the urgency of the coming 2022 election. States led by Republicans are imposing restrictive new laws that Democrats and voting rights advocates are warning could limit voter access, particularly in Black and minority communities and in cities where Democrats tend to have sway. Republicans counter that the legislation is a massive federal overreach into state elections that is unnecessary and designed to favor Democrats. By uniting around the bill, it reminded Democratic senators of the power they have when working as a group. It also showed the value of forcing the issue, as happened after Republicans deployed a filibuster to block the formation of an independent committee to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. That bill actually won bipartisan support but not enough to hit the 60-vote requirement to advance. “This is not some kind of game,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., the chairwoman of the Rules Committee. Advocates of filibuster reforms are counting on Democrats to stay united as they gear up […]

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