Little evidence for the claim McConnell would quickly ditch the filibuster

Many Democrats have pressed to eliminate or modify the Senate filibuster, a term that generally refers to extended debate that delays a vote on a pending matter. (Cloture is a device to end debate.) Under current Senate rules, 60 votes are needed to end debate on most legislation. In a 50-50 Senate, that means one side needs at least 10 votes from the other party to advance a bill to a vote on final passage.

At the moment, a major change in the rules, such as reducing the number needed to end debate below 60, does not seem likely. A small but significant minority of Democrats has rejected that idea, and the only way the rules would change is if all 50 Democrats support the idea.

But that has not stopped some Democrats, such as Castro and various left-leaning experts, from claiming that, if given the chance, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) would eliminate the filibuster in a heartbeat if he regained power.

But has McConnell ever indicated that he would do this?

Though a change in the filibuster rules might seem unlikely now, nothing is written in stone.

In 1975, when Joe Biden was in the Senate, the rules were changed so that cloture could be invoked with the support of 60 votes instead of two-thirds of the entire Senate (67 votes). While that in theory lowered the threshold for ending debate, separately a new system for tracking legislation instituted under then-Majority Leader Mike Mansfield actually made it easier to mount a filibuster because opponents no longer had to make sure they had enough senators available on the floor for votes.

“The effect of the tracking system is that a filibuster no longer ties up the business of the Senate,” wrote law professor Josh Chafetz of Cornell Law School in 2011. “Once a Senator announces an intention to filibuster a measure, the issue is simply kept on the back burner unless the majority can muster the sixty votes for cloture.”

Even so, that change did not immediately result in more filibusters. But over time — and both parties point fingers at each other for abusing the process — filibusters essentially became the norm, so that just about any bill requires at least 60 votes of support for passage.

The only exception was for budget bills under a process known as reconciliation. Over time, that has been stretched to include tax bills and just recently the coronavirus economic relief legislation pushed by Biden. Republicans in 2017 even tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act through…