Tea at Trianon: How the Senate Can Pass the SAVE Act Today, Despite the Filibuster

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, February 5, 2026

How the Senate Can Pass the SAVE Act Today, Despite the Filibuster

From Amuse on X:

The modern US Senate operates under a belief that is nearly universal and almost entirely false. Major legislation, we are told, requires 60 votes to pass. Without those votes, the chamber is paralyzed. Bills stall. Leaders shrug. The minority is said to have spoken. This belief is repeated so often that it has taken on the status of constitutional fact. I assumed it was true. It is nothing of the kind.
There is no rule of the Senate, no clause of the Constitution, and no settled historical practice that requires 60 votes for the passage of ordinary legislation. The 60 vote threshold is not law. It is not structure. It is not even tradition in any deep sense. It is a managerial norm that arose from convenience, risk aversion, and a post Reid Senate that prefers predictability to deliberation. It persists only because leaders choose to treat it as binding.
This matters now because Senate Republican leadership has an opportunity to prove otherwise. Majority Leader John Thune has promised to give the SAVE Act an up or down vote. Under the actual rules of the Senate, that vote requires only a simple majority. If leadership is willing to govern under the rules as written, the SAVE Act can pass. No rule changes are required. No nuclear option is necessary. No reconciliation gimmicks are involved. What is required is stamina and the willingness to abandon a fiction. (Read more.)