“The Senate filibuster requires 60 votes to pass most legislation. This provides a bulwark against consolidated power,” writes Ben Sasse, former U.S. Senator.

[Excerpts of article published under the heading “America Needs the Filibuster” on The Wall Street Journal website on 19 July 2026]

[By Ben Sasse]

Americans are addicted to apocalypse porn. Politicians on both sides warn that the world will end unless American life is immediately reordered around a particular set of policy proposals. The questions change, but the answer is always the same: To prevent American carnage or to defend democracy from darkness, power must be consolidated—right now.

…. The Constitution begins from a different place: extreme skepticism of consolidated power. Additionally, in the Senate, the filibuster requires 60 votes to pass most legislation. This provides a bulwark against consolidated power. Preserving this tradition is a prerequisite for national recovery and endurance.

Americans divide power again and again because we don’t want it at the center of life. We distinguish between the private and public sectors. We privilege the private sector because it’s pluralistic and persuasion-based. In the public sector, we divide power among local, state and federal governments, deferring jurisdiction over most topics to the elected officials closest to the people. We do this for the sake of accountability, experimentation and comparison, and to limit the possibility of cascading failures.

Articles I, II and III of the Constitution divide power among three federal branches: legislative, executive and judicial. Each branch checks the others, but the Founders put the most authority in legislative hands. As a result, we divide lawmaking power yet again, between two very different bodies. We put the House and Senate on different time horizons and give them different constituencies.

The upper house is built for the long view, with six-year terms that encourage a deliberative trustee model of representation. Senators owe their states both judgment and conscience. The House provides faster-loop warnings about public frustrations. Two-year terms and smaller districts combine to encourage a more urgent, passionate delegate model of representation.

Despite these differences, enacting a federal law requires navigating both complex institutions in the same 24-month window and also giving the president an opportunity to weigh in. It’s a long shot by design. We do this in part to give the public time to come aboard—or to object angrily. We also do it because civic life works better when one-size-fits-all nationwide laws come with buy-in from large cross-sections of this continental republic.

That’s American Constitutionalism 101. While the Senate’s filibuster rule isn’t in the text of the most glorious political document ever written, it plays a critical role in limiting and dividing power. Via procedural requirements to secure a supermajority of 60 votes before legislation can be passed, the filibuster safeguards the spirit of the Constitution’s anticonsolidation objective and prevents the misery of never-ending Flight 93 elections.

When partisans talk about killing or “reforming” the filibuster, they’re saying they want to turn the Senate into another House of Representatives. That would be a tragic mistake. The filibuster prevents the dramatic pendulum swings that are the natural result of simple-majority lawmaking. Every election and every vote becomes an existential crisis in a system that no longer plods through checks and balances but instead rushes to European-style referenda.

It’s a partisan’s dream: Court packing, new states, federal takeover of state elections, national adoption of Utah’s gun laws or New York’s abortion laws. Sweeping changes to nearly every aspect of national and local life.

…

The partisans who decry the filibuster always say, “The stakes are too high and we’ve got to do it for X.” Then there’s this: “The other guys are going to do it themselves, so let’s do it first.” The reality is that once the dam breaks, the stakes will climb endlessly higher. For every X on the right, there’s a Y on the left. Without the filibuster, we’ll have a never-ending cascade of doom-peddlers telling Americans our best days are behind us unless we secure 51 immediate votes for their golden legislative ticket.

There remains a chance for national recovery. It will evaporate if the right succumbs fully to the temptation of the one-way ratchet of consolidated power.

[Mr. Sasse served as a U.S. senator from Nebraska, 2015-23.]