Nearly $39 trillion in federal debt. Let that number rattle around your head for a second. The United States Senate — that grand institution that loves calling itself the “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body” — accumulated most of it while failing to perform the one job taxpayers actually send them there to do. Pass a budget. On time. Like adults.

But this isn’t merely a spending problem. It’s a structural rot. The Senate has become a place where legislation goes to die quietly, where paralysis masquerades as procedure, and where most members seem perfectly content to ride out their terms without accomplishing a single meaningful thing. Most of them, anyway. One veteran senator has apparently hit his limit — and what he’s demanding caught even me off guard.

From the Daily Wire:

From the viewpoint of a limited government conservative, slowing down the passage of legislation that generally tends to grow government and reduce our freedom, the saucer analogy seemed very appealing. But now that I’ve served within this highly partisan and dysfunctional body for 15 years, I would say a better analogy is the Senate is more like the plaque clogging an artery leading to a heart attack.

Since I entered Congress in 2011, we should have passed 180 appropriations bills prior to the start of the fiscal year they were funding. We have passed a whopping total of six on time. That’s a 96.7% failure rate. Because of that dysfunction, we have had five shutdowns, had to rely on 57 continuing resolutions to fund government on an interim basis, and increased or suspended the debt ceiling 12 times to allow the government to incur an additional $24 trillion in debt.

That’s Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. Third-term Republican. Chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. A guy who rode the Tea Party wave into Washington back in 2011 with genuine ambitions to shrink government. Fifteen years later, he’s not tinkering around the edges. He’s calling for the elimination of the Senate filibuster.

Yeah. A sitting Republican senator wants to scrap the 60-vote threshold. Digest that for a moment.

How the filibuster became a weapon against debate

Here’s what most Americans never learned in civics class. The filibuster wasn’t designed to kill legislation. It was designed to slow it down. When the Senate created the cloture vote in 1917, it existed as a pressure valve — a way to end genuinely marathon debate sessions. Think the 57-day filibuster before the Civil Rights Act. Senators actually had to stand up and argue their case. Exhaustion eventually won, and the body moved to a vote.

That version of the Senate is dead. Today, the minority party deploys the 60-vote cloture requirement at the beginning of the process, strangling bills before a single word of debate occurs. No discussion. No amendments. No votes. Just a procedural chokehold that produces absolutely nothing — except, apparently, $24 trillion in new debt.

The Democrat move Republicans keep ignoring

Johnson raises a point that should make every Republican uncomfortable. In 2022, Democrats came within two votes of eliminating the filibuster entirely. Two votes. Does anyone with a functioning memory believe they won’t finish that job the instant they reclaim the majority? Meanwhile, Democrats are already holding DHS employees hostage over their obsession with defunding ICE and CBP. These are not people who respect procedural norms. Republicans who keep treating the filibuster like sacred scripture are playing checkers against a chess team that already flipped the board once.

Why acting first might actually fix things

Here’s where Johnson’s argument gets genuinely interesting. Strip away the 60-vote shield, he argues, and something unexpected happens. Both parties would actually need to build coalitions. Find common ground. Craft legislation durable enough to survive the next power shift. Without the filibuster as a security blanket, senators might — brace yourself — have to govern. The irony is almost too perfect.

A 96.7% failure rate on appropriations. Thirty-nine trillion dollars in debt, climbing higher by the hour. Five government shutdowns since 2011. At a certain point, defending these rules stops being principled and starts being willful denial. Senator Johnson gets it. The real threat to conservative governance isn’t changing a Senate procedure. It’s watching the whole institution calcify into irrelevance while the country’s balance sheet collapses beneath our feet.

Key Takeaways

• Sen. Ron Johnson demands an end to the Senate filibuster to restore functional governance.
• The Senate has failed to pass appropriations on time 96.7% of the time since 2011.
• Democrats nearly killed the filibuster in 2022 and will almost certainly try again.
• Defending broken rules isn’t conservative — it’s surrender dressed up as principle.

Sources: Source