How MAGA could 'wipe out' Democrats

An expert on law, politics and foreign policy explained in a Sunday editorial that the same logic used by President Trump and his supporters to invade Iran is also being used to justify getting rid of the Senate filibuster.

“Sen. John Cornyn’s reversal on the Senate filibuster may or may not be sincere, but it is logical,” The Washington Post’s Jason Willick wrote in a Sunday editorial about Trump’s demand that the Senate abandon the 60-out-of-100 vote threshold necessary to call off a filibuster. Trump wishes to nuke the filibuster because Democrats are using that to thwart his attempt to pass the SAVE Act, a mass disenfranchisement law he insists is necessary to help Republicans keep control of Congress in the 2026 midterm elections.

“That supermajority threshold for most legislation has historically made it harder for the majority party to steamroll the minority,” Willick wrote. “Cornyn (who has been in the Senate for nearly a quarter-century) argues that this arrangement used to make sense, but today’s Democratic Party can no longer be trusted to respect it.”

Because Democrats came two votes away from getting rid of the Senate filibuster in 2022, Willick concluded that Cornyn “has a point” insofar as the filibuster is concerned, then speculated that this same logic is being applied by Trump to justify invading Iran.

“Iran has been inveterately hostile to the United States for decades,” Willick wrote. “But the U.S. has long managed to deter the regime from taking the two steps that would be most threatening to American interests: closing the Strait of Hormuz and building a nuclear weapon.” Now that America and Israel have invaded Iran, “there’s a good chance the surviving elements of the Iranian regime will see the U.S.” as having escalated matters past the point of no return.

“When deterrence erodes, incapacitation becomes more important,” Willick said. “If the U.S. and Israel want to prevent Iran from closing the strait or lunging for a nuclear weapon, they’ll need to make sure it never rebuilds the capacity to do so after this war. That will be an arduous process, likely requiring further attacks. And there’s no guarantee that a future U.S. president will be up for them.”

The bottom line, as Willick put it, is that “the chances of Iran building a bomb are thankfully much lower” than the likelihood of the Senate eventually abolishing the filibuster, “but, I fear, higher than they were before Trump started this war.”

Trump’s desire to eliminate the filibuster and thereby pass the SAVE Act is so intense, the president has refused to endorse either Cornyn or Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the ongoing Senate Republican primary as a means of pressuring the Senate to get rid of the filibuster. Yet as Semafor journalist Burgess Everett reported earlier in March, “the Republican Congress is consumed by a daunting, nearly impossible task: Satisfying President Donald Trump’s desire for new federal voter ID legislation.” Many of them share his belief that the law is necessary to avoid losing in the midterms, but also fear that getting rid of the filibuster to pass it will leave them vulnerable to future major policy shifts by the Democrats.

"The one thing I’ve said all along and I’ve told [Trump] and others — that I can’t guarantee an outcome,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters earlier this month about Trump’s anti-filibuster crusade. “I can’t guarantee a result if the result is only achieved by nuking the legislative filibuster. We don’t have the votes to do that, and so that’s just not a realistic option, and I’ve made that clear to anybody who’s asked."