Seven Amazing Pieces of Legislation the GOP Could Pass if They Eliminate the Filibuster

We can have nice things again in America. All it will take is the Republican Party in the Senate to eliminate the filibuster. For many of us who have supported the filibuster for years, that can be a hard pill to swallow until we realize two things.

First, the filibuster was designed for a time when the parties were not such polar opposites. As crazy as it may sound to young Americans out there, they used to be able to agree in Congress on a lot of things. They may have had different ways of wanting a goal achieved, but even Democrats like Senator Joe Biden used to call for a secure border. Today, the filibuster means any piece of legislation that is mildly partisan has no chance of passing.

Second and more importantly, Democrats will eliminate the filibuster the moment they have power. Lest we forget, they already tried last time they had power and if either Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema hadn’t objected, the Democrats would have succeeded. Neither Manchin nor Sinema are there now.

Here are seven pieces of legislation that could finally be passed if Republicans mostly united. I say “mostly” because it appears they only need one of the four primary objectors to turn.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune is the real obstacle. His status as Republican Manager for the UniParty Swamp makes it extremely difficult to get around, which is why it is incumbent on all of us to pressure him into doing what’s best for the nation instead of what’s best for his puppet masters.

We will cover all of this thoroughly on today’s episode of The JD Rucker Show. Here’s the list of some of the legislation we could pass immediately if the filibuster is dropped, in no particular order…

Your Carry Permit Shouldn’t Disappear When You Cross a State Line

A driver’s license works in all fifty states. Get married in Texas and you’re married in New York. Adopt a child in Florida and that child is yours in California. Yet a law-abiding citizen who passes a background check, completes the training, and earns a concealed carry permit in one state can become an instant criminal simply by driving across an invisible line on a map.

The Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act fixes that. It requires every state that issues carry permits to honor the permits issued by every other state — exactly the way they already honor driver’s licenses.

The House has passed versions of this bill before. It dies in one place and one place only: the United States Senate, where it cannot clear the sixty-vote threshold no matter how many Americans support it. A simple majority of senators would vote yes tomorrow. The filibuster is the only thing standing between a permit holder and the freedom to travel through their own country without fear of arrest.

Here is the part the holdouts in our own conference need to hear. The Second Amendment is not a regional privilege. It does not stop at the Hudson River or the Mississippi. A right that evaporates the moment you leave your home state is not a right at all — it is a license granted at the pleasure of whichever governor you happen to be standing in front of. National reciprocity restores the plain meaning of “shall not be infringed” to citizens who have done everything the law asked of them.

And make no mistake about the stakes. The other side has already told us, in public, that they intend to abolish the filibuster the moment they hold the gavel — and an assault weapons ban is at the top of their list. They are not hiding it. So the choice in front of the Senate is not whether the filibuster survives. It is whether we use this window to protect the right to bear arms, or sit on our hands and let them use the very same fifty-one votes to gut it.

They Filibustered a Bill That Simply Says Don’t Let a Living Baby Die

Strip away every argument about abortion for a moment and consider a narrower question. A child is born — breathing, with a heartbeat, fully outside the womb — after a failed abortion attempt. Does that infant deserve the same medical care any other newborn would receive? The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act says yes. It does not ban a single abortion. It does not overturn anything. It simply requires that a baby who survives be given the ordinary care a doctor would give any other living child.

This is not a radical bill. It is arguably the most modest pro-life measure Congress has ever considered. And yet, in early 2025, Senate Democrats blocked it from even advancing — the motion died short of sixty votes. The House then passed its own version, where it now sits, waiting for a Senate that cannot move it. A clear majority of senators support protecting these infants. The filibuster is the reason a born, breathing child has fewer protections in federal law than the political convenience of those who would rather not take the vote.

The opposition calls the bill redundant. They say infanticide is already illegal, so why legislate it. But a law without enforcement is only a suggestion, and this bill adds the teeth — a clear standard of care and real consequences for violating it. If the act truly changes nothing, as critics insist, then there was no reason to filibuster it. The fact that they spent political capital to kill a bill they call meaningless tells you exactly how meaningful it really is.

A nation is judged by how it treats the most defenseless among it, and there is no one more defenseless than a newborn who cannot speak, cannot move, and depends entirely on the conscience of the adults in the room. Sixty votes should never stand between that child and a doctor’s basic duty to care. With the filibuster gone, this protection becomes law with a simple majority — and the only question left is why anyone would object.

Every Border Victory Was Signed in Pen and Can Be Erased the Same Way

Look closely at how the border was secured, and you’ll notice something unsettling. Almost all of it rests on executive action — proclamations, agency directives, memoranda. Remain in Mexico. Asylum limits. Parole restrictions. Interior enforcement priorities.

Every one of them is real, every one of them is working, and every single one of them can be reversed on the first afternoon of the next Democratic administration with nothing more than a signature. We have lived this movie before. We watched a secure border dismantled by executive order in a matter of weeks.

There is only one way to make border security permanent, and that is to write it into law. Mandatory nationwide E-Verify, so that a job in this country requires legal status. Defunding the sanctuary jurisdictions that shield criminals from deportation. Codifying Remain in Mexico so no future president can simply cancel it. Kate’s Law, with real penalties for those who are deported and return again. Each of these commands majority support in the Senate. Not one of them can survive a filibuster.

This is the difference between a policy and a law. A policy lasts as long as the man in the Oval Office wants it to. A law endures until Congress changes it. Right now we are governing the border by executive whim, which means we are one election away from watching all of it disappear — and the cartels know it, the coyotes know it, and the millions waiting to cross know it. Temporary enforcement is an invitation to wait us out.

The filibuster does not protect the border. It protects the open-border status quo, by guaranteeing that every gain we make can only ever be temporary. And here is the reciprocity the holdouts keep forgetting: the other side has promised to nuke the filibuster the moment they can, and they will use it to pass amnesty, not enforcement. We are not choosing between a pristine Senate tradition and partisan hardball. We are choosing between writing our border policy into permanent law now, or handing them the tools to write theirs later.

You Are Still Funding Planned Parenthood and Sixty Votes Is the Reason Why

Every year, hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars flow to Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States. Money is fungible — every federal dollar that covers their rent, their staff, and their overhead is a dollar freed up for what they are best known for. For decades, the many Americans who object to subsidizing the abortion industry with their own taxes have asked a simple thing: stop sending our money there. And for decades, that simple request has been denied.

It has been denied not because the votes aren’t there. A Senate majority would redirect that funding to the thousands of community health centers that provide women’s health care without performing abortions — facilities that outnumber Planned Parenthood clinics many times over. The money would not vanish; it would go to genuine, comprehensive care. The only obstacle is the sixty-vote threshold, which lets a determined minority shield a single politically favored organization against the will of the majority.

Reconciliation has allowed Congress to chip at the edges of this funding, but a clean, permanent defunding bill — one that doesn’t expire, one that can’t be quietly restored in the next budget cycle — requires regular legislation. And regular legislation dies in the filibuster. So the funding survives, year after year, not because the country demands it, but because the Senate’s own rules protect it.

This is the heart of the larger argument. The filibuster is not a neutral guardian of deliberation. In practice it is a one-way ratchet that locks in the priorities of the institutions the other party favors while blocking the things a majority of Americans actually want. Remove it, and taxpayer funding of the abortion industry ends with fifty-one votes. Leave it in place, and we are simply waiting for the day they remove it themselves — and use those same fifty-one votes to write abortion funding into permanent federal law.

Everything DOGE Cut Comes Roaring Back the Day the Other Side Wins

The Department of Government Efficiency did something Washington swore was impossible. It went line by line through the federal bureaucracy and cut waste, duplication, and spending that no one could defend — billions of dollars of it. For anyone who has spent years watching the budget balloon while the government grew less competent, it was a genuine victory. But there is a catch almost no one is talking about, and it should worry every Republican in the Senate.

Almost none of it is permanent. The cuts, the reorganizations, the eliminated programs — much of it lives in executive action and administrative decisions that the next administration can reverse as easily as flipping a switch. The bureaucracy is patient. It knows how to wait out a presidency. Every position left unfilled can be filled again, every program zeroed out can be funded again, every reform quietly undone with a memo. Without legislation, DOGE is not a reform. It is a pause.

To make these savings stick, they have to become law. The cuts written into statute, the eliminated programs formally repealed, the reforms codified so no future president can restore them. A Senate majority would do exactly that. The filibuster is what stops it — the same sixty-vote wall that protects every entrenched program DOGE tried to cut, by ensuring that any permanent reform can be blocked by the very interests that feed on the status quo.

Think about what that means. The hardest, most thankless work of actually shrinking the government has already been done. The only thing standing between that work and permanence is a procedural rule a simple majority could set aside. And remember who is waiting on the other side. The day the gavel changes hands, they will not only reverse every cut — they will use the cleared filibuster to fund and expand the bureaucracy beyond anything we’ve seen. The choice is to lock in these savings now, while we can, or to watch them evaporate and be replaced by something far larger.

The Department of Education Exists Today Only Because of Sixty Votes

For more than forty years, returning education to the states has been a stated goal — the conviction that decisions about how children learn belong to parents, local school boards, and state legislatures, not to a sprawling federal bureaucracy in Washington that has never taught a single child to read. The Department of Education spends tens of billions of dollars a year, and after four decades, scores are flat or falling. By the one measure that matters, it has not worked.

There have been real efforts to shrink it, hand its functions back to the states and other agencies, and in some visions close it entirely. Much of that has been attempted through executive action — and like everything done by executive action, it is temporary, tied up in court, and reversible by the next president. To actually restructure or abolish the department, to send education dollars to the states as block grants with no strings attached, you need an act of Congress. You need a law.

And a law is exactly what the filibuster prevents. A Senate majority that believes Washington should get out of the classroom cannot enact that belief, because sixty votes are required and the defenders of the federal education establishment will never provide them. So the department endures — not because the country is convinced of its value, not because it has earned its budget, but because the Senate’s rules protect it from the majority that would reform it.

This is the pattern running through every item on this list. Concealed carry, the unborn, the border, taxpayer funding, government waste, and now the classroom — in each case a majority of senators stand ready to act, and in each case a single procedural rule stops them cold. The filibuster is not preserving some grand tradition of compromise. It is preserving the administrative state. And the other side has already promised to tear the rule down the instant they have the power to. The only real decision left for the Senate is whether to act on the mandate it was given, or guard a rule that protects everything we were sent to Washington to change — right up until the day our opponents discard it and turn the majority against us.

The SAVE America Act Is the Most Crucial Bill in Modern American History

Every other item on this list — the right to carry, the protection of the unborn, a secured border, an end to taxpayer-funded abortion, a leaner government, a federal hand lifted off the classroom — depends on one thing that comes before all of them. It depends on who is allowed to decide. Elections are the foundation beneath every policy, every reform, every victory we could ever hope to write into law. Get the foundation wrong, and nothing built on top of it can stand. That is why the SAVE America Act is not just another bill on a wish list. It is the one the whole list rests on.

What it asks for is almost startling in its simplicity. It requires documentary proof of citizenship to register and to vote, and it asks Americans to show who they are at the ballot box. That’s it. The law already says that only citizens of the United States may vote in our federal elections — that has never been in dispute. What the law has never done is give the system a reliable way to verify it. Right now, registration runs on the honor system: a box checked, a signature attesting under penalty of perjury, and no document required to back it up. SAVE closes that gap. It takes a principle every American claims to believe — that American citizens, and only American citizens, choose American leaders — and finally makes it something we can actually confirm.

Here is why “most crucial” is not hyperbole. A nation can survive a bad tax policy; it can be repealed. It can survive a bad regulation; it can be undone. What a nation cannot survive is the loss of public faith that its elections mean anything at all. The moment a meaningful share of citizens no longer believes the count is honest, the consent of the governed — the entire premise of the republic — begins to dissolve.

Every other fight we wage assumes that elections settle questions legitimately. Take that away and the arguing never ends, because no result is ever accepted as final. Securing the franchise to citizens is not one priority among many. It is the precondition for the rest of them having any durability at all.

And it is being blocked. The House has passed it. The President has called it his single highest priority. A majority of the Senate would vote for it tomorrow, and a large majority of the American people — across every demographic you can name — support requiring proof of citizenship and identification to vote. Yet it sits shelved, because it cannot reach sixty votes, because the other side refused to allow even a debate on it.

Sit with that. The most basic safeguard of self-government, supported by the majority of the chamber and the overwhelming majority of the country, cannot become law — not because the votes aren’t there, but because a procedural rule says fifty-one is not enough.

This is the bill that started the fight over the filibuster, and it is the bill worth ending the filibuster for. Make no mistake about what the alternative looks like. The other side has promised, out loud, to abolish the filibuster the instant they hold the majority — and when they do, they will not be securing citizenship at the ballot box. They will be moving in the opposite direction, federalizing our elections and writing their own rules over the objection of half the country.

So the question for the Senate is brutally simple. We can use the majority we were given to secure the most fundamental act in a free society while we still hold the pen — or we can guard a sixty-vote rule right up until the day our opponents throw it out and use the very same power to dismantle the safeguard for good. There is no bill more important to get right, and no clearer test of whether this majority understands the moment it is living in.