Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

There’s No Half-Way to End the Filibuster

Democrats will just have to decide whether they want to keep living with minority-party Senate rule. (Are you listening, Joe Manchin?)

March 17, 2021 at 11:30 AM UTC

By Jonathan Bernstein

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

Senator Filibuster.
Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

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Forcing senators to give marathon orations to carry out a filibuster is a bad idea, but it looks like it may be a bad idea whose time has come, with President Joe Biden endorsing the “talking filibuster” in an ABC News interview. Why? Because most Democrats want to eliminate the filibuster, and Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia — the most moderate Democrat in the Senate — has said that while he absolutely won’t vote to eliminate the filibuster, he’s open to going the “talking” route.