When Republican Majority Leader John Thune took to the Senate floor to weaken the filibuster on September 11, 2025, it was not just another sign of partisan acrimony in Washington. It was also the latest example of what may be developing into one of the most accelerated trends in a generation to curtail the rights of the minority party in Congress. These rights are critical to the ability of the House and Senate to deliberate, negotiate, forge bipartisan consensus, and hold the executive branch to account. This escalating assault on minority rights diminishes Congress as an institution and degrades its ability to fulfill its constitutional responsibilities.
Going Nuclear
In legislative parlance, Thune amended post-cloture debate procedures to allow the Senate to confirm sub-Cabinet-level nominees as a group (en bloc) rather than through the more time-consuming process of debating and voting on each candidate individually. He argued that Democrats were engaging in unprecedented obstruction of President Trump’s nominees by forcing cloture votes and using full debate time even for routine candidates instead of allowing some to advance more quickly by unanimous consent or voice votes, which was the practice in previous administrations.
Democrats responded that many of Trump’s picks were historically bad. To their point, several nominees were forced to withdraw after more searching inquiries into their backgrounds and qualifications. These included Ed Martin, Trump’s nominee for D.C. U.S. Attorney who embraced January 6 conspiracy theories, Karen Brazell, Trump’s nominee for Veterans Affairs Under Secretary for Benefits who was involved in aggressive agency staffing and contract cuts, Matt Gaetz, Trump’s initial choice for Attorney General whose candidacy unraveled amid a torrent of accusations, and most recently Paul Ingrassia, Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel whose racist text messages led Democrats to call for his withdrawal. In these and other cases, scrutiny from the minority helped empower the full Senate to do its job.
In addition, holding up nominees is one of the few time-honored levers that Senators in the minority use to obtain needed information or to prompt negotiations on substantive priorities. In this case, Democrats were negotiating. They offered to clear nominees in exchange for reversing some of Trump’s unprecedented withholding of funds appropriated by Congress. But Trump scuttled those negotiations in a social media post calling the minority’s approach “political extortion” and telling Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to “GO TO HELL!”
Thune indeed abandoned negotiations and, with this procedural maneuver, invoked the so-called “nuclear option.” The majority quickly confirmed 107 nominees with simple majorities in two subsequent votes. But they did nothing to stop Trump’s campaign to wrest the power of the purse from the Legislative Branch.
Admittedly, Democrats changed the filibuster in 2013 when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid reduced the threshold to a simple majority for lower-level executive and judicial nominees, which he also claimed were being unfairly stalled in unprecedented ways.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell famously responded in 2017 by invoking the nuclear option for Supreme Court nominees, and Trump named three Justices during his first term. In addition, in 2019, McConnell reduced debate time on non-Cabinet nominees from thirty hours to two, speeding up the process but still allowing Senators to force individual votes. This is what Thune just changed with his en bloc maneuver.
A Broader Trend
What makes the majority’s recent actions different is that they are part of a more sweeping trend across both houses of Congress to aggressively limit the minority’s rights by changing, skirting, and openly flouting the rules.
In the Senate, this was not the first time this year the majority bypassed the filibuster; it was the third.
In May, using the process established by the Congressional Review Act for disapproving agency rules with a simple majority, Republicans struck down California’s plan to phase out gasoline powered cars. They took this action despite a Government Accountability Office finding that California’s plan was not a “rule” under the law and should have been subject to the filibuster—a conclusion the Senate Parliamentarian supported.
And in June, Senate Republicans narrowly passed Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill using the reconciliation process, which requires only a majority vote. To avoid the filibuster, reconciliation bills may not increase the deficit beyond a ten-year budget window. Yet the majority bypassed this requirement by adopting a “current policy” baseline that disregarded trillions of dollars in deficits by pretending expiring tax cuts were extended indefinitely.
This trend extends to committees as well. In July, Senator Cory Booker moved under Judiciary Committee Rule 4 to postpone a vote on circuit court nominee Emil Bove so the Committee could obtain testimony from a whistleblower who disclosed that Bove directed prosecutors to ignore court orders, but Chairman Chuck Grassley ruled Booker’s motion out of order. Although Republicans claimed Democrats did the same thing in the previous Congress, in fact then-Chairman Dick Durbin held a recorded vote to overcome the minority’s Rule 4 motion, while Grassley refused to hold any vote at all in this more recent exchange.
Democrats walked out in protest as a result. They pointed out that the purposes of these rules—the reasons they were created in the first place—is to foster deliberation, allow members to represent the views and interests of their constituents, promote compromise and consensus, and exercise the oversight power of Congress by obtaining critical information.
An Even Starker Trend in the House
The majority in the House has been curtailing minority rights at an even more rapid pace, including when it comes to obtaining information from the executive branch.
In April, Republicans blocked dozens of Democratic “resolutions of inquiry,” including those seeking information about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Signal chats regarding classified military strikes on Yemen. Under House rules, if a committee does not act on such a resolution within 14 “legislative days,” a motion on the floor must be considered before other business. Republicans worried they might lose the Hegseth resolution vote in committee (one GOP member had already called on Trump to fire Hegseth, and others faced competitive races). So House leaders avoided the mandatory floor vote by simply declaring the entire five-month period from April 29 to September 30 a single “legislative day,” effectively freezing the 14-day clock.
Members had hoped resolutions of inquiry would make a comeback in October when this prohibition expired, but the majority quietly extended the prohibition through next Spring on their way out of Washington ahead of the government shut-down.
House Republicans also blocked a resolution championed by Democratic Rep. Brittany Peterson and Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna to authorize members to vote by proxy if they are new parents or are pregnant and have health conditions affecting their travel. Under House rules, if a measure has been stuck in committee for more than thirty legislative days, it may be “discharged” and brought to the floor when a majority of members signs a petition, as they did here. Yet Republican House leaders used a procedural maneuver to kill this discharge petition because it was backed primarily by Democrats.
Another prominent discharge petition supported mainly by Democrats (and some Republicans) would require the Justice Department to finally turn over its full file on Jeffrey Epstein. It was about to get the final signature it needed to force a vote on the floor when Republicans shut down the House and refused to swear in Adelita Grijalva, the latest Democrat to win a special election to the House. It’s been weeks since she overwhelmingly won, yet Speaker Mike Johnson is forsaking his constitutional responsibility to the House and the 800,000 citizens of Arizona who are without representation, as retired Republican Rep. Mo Brooks recently pointed out.
In addition, when Republicans took the House in the previous Congress, they sought to restrict the so-called “seven-member rule,” a federal law enacted in 1928 that requires agencies to provide information requested by any seven members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Although the statute explicitly delegates authority to a minority of committee members, the majority added a provision to House rules requiring that one of the seven signatories be the committee chair. The goal was obvious: give the majority power to shut down the minority’s access to information under this law.
There are many other examples. In March, House Republicans blocked a Democratic-led effort to override Trump’s tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China under the National Emergencies Act, which requires committee consideration of resolutions ending presidential emergencies within fifteen calendar days and a floor vote within three days after that. But House Republicans passed a provision declaring that each day for the rest of the year “shall not constitute a calendar day” for purposes of the law.
They used similar word games to prevent a vote in April to block Trump’s emergency declaration to impose global tariffs and to prevent a vote in September to block tariffs imposed on Brazil after Trump’s ally, former president Jair Bolsonaro, was convicted of plotting a coup after he lost his election.
And in a stunning development, the current House majority just broke the record for the most bills ever considered with no amendments allowed on the floor. According to the House Rules Committee, the majority has already adopted more “closed rules” during this Congress than in any previous year in history.
This feat is even more incredible considering that Speaker Johnson adjourned the chamber weeks ago for the shut-down and hasn’t allowed a single vote since. As a result, the House hasn’t conducted any oversight of administration actions that some Republicans also question, such as military strikes against alleged drug shipments without congressional authorization. As Rep. Adam Smith, the top ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, warns, “Mike Johnson has effectively dissolved the United States House of Representatives.”
The Bigger Picture
There are certainly many examples of Democrats curtailing minority rights when they were in power. In addition to Senator Reid’s change to the filibuster in 2013, House Democrats previously restricted resolutions of inquiry and the minority’s ability to offer motions to recommit measures to committees with “instructions” that sometimes posed political problems for certain majority members. And Republicans may recall a controversy forty years ago when the Democratic House majority seated Democrat Frank McCloskey instead of Republican Richard McIntyre after several recounts, causing a GOP walkout.
But the actions of the current majority suggest an across-the-board escalation in curtailing minority rights. What’s different at this historical moment is the pace and scale of these changes across both houses, and they are not yet through the first half of the 119th Congress.
So why is this happening?
One reason is that the President is fueling caustic hyper-partisanship. He compels combativeness among his followers and celebrates disdain for both the minority and its participation in the legislative process. This approach, which scholars have deemed “affective polarization,” breeds distrust and brinksmanship, and it impairs collaboration and negotiation when they are needed most, as the current shut-down demonstrates.
It also has the effect—even when there is collaboration—of blocking what a majority of members wants. Minority rules allow all members to propose and advocate for measures that might gain enough support from both sides to pass. But the current Republican leadership would rather jettison minority rights, abandon negotiations, and block even bipartisan measures that Trump opposes. They allow Trump to defy laws that he claims don’t (or shouldn’t) apply to him. And knowing they have a once-in-a-generation trifecta of unified government in Washington, they engage in opportunistic “go for broke” abuses.
The current majority seems determined to hasten Trump’s slide into authoritarianism, “marked not by a single dramatic event but the slow corrosion of our ruling institutions,” as David Brooks puts it. The purpose of the Constitution’s division of powers is to ensure the nation will never be subservient to a sovereign. Thomas Jefferson feared the consolidation of unchecked authority through “elective despotism,” and James Madison warned that the accumulation of government powers in the same hands “may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
Yet Republican leaders are allowing their fealty to the President to erode the Framers’ vision for their institutional role. Operating at the direction of the President to block bipartisan measures and deprive members of information, Congress risks losing its ability to ensure that the Executive Branch is faithfully executing the laws Congress passes. This imperils the Constitution’s system of checks and balances that is essential to the functioning of our democracy.
Dave Rapallo is an Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Federal Legislation Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center, and he served for more than 20 years in high-level positions in Congress. His forthcoming article in Volume 63 of the Harvard Journal on Legislation is entitled Mapping Minority Investigative Powers in Congress.