President Donald Trump made a “sales pitch” to Republican senators Wednesday, calling on them to eliminate the filibuster.
Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted Republican senators for breakfast the morning after sweeping Republican losses in off-year elections Tuesday night.
Trump gave senators a “sales pitch” for “why we should do away with the filibuster and try to save the country,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., told The Daily Signal.
“He’s on his soapbox about selling the opportunity to have a 51-vote to get the country going again,” he said in a phone interview after the breakfast.
Trump told Republicans, “If you don’t terminate the filibuster, we won’t pass any legislation. There will be no legislation passed for three or four years,” adding that Republicans needed to eliminate the filibuster to end mail-in voting, pass election-integrity measures, and pass voter-ID laws.
The pitch resonated with Tuberville, who said the American people voted for Trump, and Republicans need a mechanism to pass his agenda.
“The American people unanimously, in the biggest election ever, voted for Trump to be in office,” he said. “We knew it was going to be a fight. We knew that the Democrats were going to try to block him in every possible way they could. We know that at the end of the day, they will not do anything for three years but try to block everything President Trump does.”
However, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., was not swayed.
“I don’t doubt that he could have some sway with members,” Thune said after the breakfast. “But I know where the math is on this issue in the Senate, and … it’s just not happening.”
“Government is not working right now,” Tuberville, a former Auburn football coach, said. “We’re $38 trillion in debt. We’re not doing something right. So, I think we give President Trump whatever he wants, and we go from there and give him a chance to save this country, because if we continue down this path, we’re not going to make it as the country that you and I grew up in.”
Tuberville doesn’t think ending the filibuster is the only way to end the government shutdown because, he says, “four or five of the Democrats will come to their senses and say, ‘enough is enough.’”
But Republicans need to eliminate the filibuster to pass the president’s other priorities, he said, such as slashing the national debt.
“We’ve got to draw a line and stand here and say, ‘Are we going to get something done? Are we just going to sit back and punish the American people?’ Because that’s who’s going to get punished if we don’t open the government,” he said, “and if President Trump doesn’t get his agenda through.”
After the government reopens, Tuberville said, Trump will likely have discussions to “correct and get Obamacare put in its right place.”
“It’s been a disaster since it started,” he said. “Twelve years afterwards, we’ve got a lot of kids in debt financially because Obama said he’s going to pay for Obamacare through student loans. Now you got millions and tens of millions of kids that have student loans that value up to $2 trillion that they’re in debt.”
The senator hopes Trump “takes a front-row seat on this and says, ‘OK, let’s straighten out our health care, and let’s work with the Democrats to where the federal government and the taxpayers don’t have to fund it.’”
Tuberville said Republicans’ second meeting with the president at the White House in three weeks was fruitful.
“He’s trying to tell us the things that he wants to get done,” he said. “But again, I think what’s standing in the way right now is going to be the filibuster, and the Democrats know that no longer they can put it off, the less that we can get done.”
While Trump said he thinks the shutdown played a role in Republican losses in New York, New Jersey, and Virginia, Tuberville said those areas were “already lost to socialism and big government.”
Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., also said she was unsurprised by the poor election results last night.
“These were solidly Democrat states and cities where Kamala Harris secured strong victories in 2024, so frankly, last night’s results came as no surprise to me,” she told The Daily Signal. “What concerns me now is whether my colleagues across the aisle will finally abandon the reckless strategy of holding our government hostage to energize their progressive base.”
