Many in Washington have begun to speak the language of war. Republicans tell us we are fighting for the Constitution, for the culture, and for the future of the country. That rhetoric alone marks a welcome change. For decades, American politics has been treated as a technocratic dispute among credentialed elites, where process matters more than outcomes and elections merely decide if the managerial state has to occasionally mount some resistance against GOP political appointees.

Yet, there exists a harmful disconnect between rhetoric and behavior. While Republican leaders increasingly talk like participants in an existential struggle, they continue to govern like caretakers of the status quo. They campaign like insurgents, but legislate like custodians.

This contradiction is heightened with talk of a “Golden Age,” a phrase often invoked as a form of reassurance or a fulfilled prophecy. Republicans, though, are mistaken: we are not in a Golden Age. Augustus did not declare the Pax Romana in the middle of a civil war, let alone a cold one like ours. It was named after power had been consolidated and institutions reshaped. Golden ages follow conquest; they don’t precede it.

The Pax Americana will come after victory is achieved, not before it.

By any serious measure, a fundamental shift toward recovering self-government is still far out of reach. Narrow Senate and House majorities, a single reconciliation bill, and a stack of executive orders do not amount to a convincing win. These are simply tactical gains. Elected Republicans declaring these achievements a “Golden Age” is an example of what happens when movements talk themselves into complacency.

This is compounded by the tendency among conservatives to focus far more on theory than practice. Though they have become excellent diagnosticians of the cold civil war in which we find ourselves, they fail to understand that a movement that speaks primarily in the language of diagnosis is incapable of governing.

Real victory means setting the direction of our national life for a generation, and forcing political opponents to operate within institutions we have constructed rather than the ones they built.  

That level of control has always required two things: a concentration of political power and the discipline to use it. But in America, those moments do not last forever. Windows close, and movements that understand this move quickly to lock in structural change. Those who hesitate negotiate themselves into paralysis, mistake symbolism for strategy, lose the moment—and ultimately the possibility of launching a true political revolution.

Masters of the Senate

For most of modern American history, the kind of command it takes to achieve a true and lasting political revolution has required overwhelming legislative power. The mid-1960s are the clearest example of this.

After Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide victory in 1964, Democrats entered Congress with margins that rendered Republican resistance largely irrelevant, with 68 seats in the Senate and 295 in the House. That dominance followed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed after the Democrats successfully framed themselves as the party of moral superiority. They then worked diligently to enact the Great Society promises LBJ outlined on the campaign trail.

The Democrats did not waste the moment. With their supermajority secured, they moved quickly to construct a new American regime. The Great Society was not a loose collection of social programs. It was a sophisticated project aimed at permanently uprooting the American Founding by expanding federal authority over education, health care, immigration, culture, and economic life. New departments and agencies were created. New entitlements were established. New norms for federal intervention were normalized. Democrats governed like a party that understood both the rarity of the opportunity and the danger of hesitation. Since then, they haven’t stopped building upon it—too often, with the help of Republicans. The same pattern appeared briefly during the Obama years.

A critical lesson must be learned: carrying out a successful political revolution does not require permanent supermajorities. But it does require, at the very least, temporary political dominance combined with procedural aggression and institutional coordination.

Those who achieve overwhelming power move fast and win big. But those who hesitate lose the moment—and often at great expense for future generations. The Republican majority must decide to use its power for good purposes. Otherwise, having a majority is little more than a short-term strategy to avoid cycles of impeachment proceedings.

The Supermajority Mirage

Democrats were able to govern with such swiftness and force in LBJ’s era because they achieved supermajorities. But today, even if Republicans want a supermajority, our next few national elections will make one extraordinarily hard to obtain.

Heading into the 2026 cycle, Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate and a 218-213 edge in the House, which is really just a one-seat majority due to four Republican vacancies.

Achieving a governing supermajority on the scale of LBJ’s House in 1965 would require something approaching 290 seats. Closing the gap would demand a net GOP gain of roughly 70 seats, an almost fantastical outcome in our era. Furthermore, ballot splitting is more uncommon, Republicans in states like Indiana obstruct redistricting efforts, and the sitting president’s party has shed House seats in eight of the previous ten midterm elections, even losing the chamber outright about half the time. Even before debates over party ideology enter the picture, the laws of political gravity assert themselves, despite the overenthusiastic claims of the consultant class.

But the Senate is really where the GOP’s dream of a supermajority runs into a wall.

Republicans currently hold 53 seats, which means they need a net gain of seven seats without giving any back. But in the next two cycles, 33 Senate seats are up, 20 of which are Republican-held. This shifts the Republican Party’s strategic posture from offense to defense. The 2026 battlefield is concentrated in a handful of genuinely competitive states, and the rest of the map is either locked down or only becomes competitive under extreme conditions. For example, Cook’s January 2026 ratings have only four races (two Republican and two Democratic) sitting in toss-up territory, with most contests parked in the “Solid” or “Likely” categories. In other words, the very structure of the 2026 map severely caps the potential upside for Republicans.

Then comes 2028, which is even more unforgiving. Many Class III seats are up in states like California, New York, Washington, Oregon, Illinois, Maryland, and others that are not realistically in play for the GOP. Yes, there are swing-state opportunities like Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and New Hampshire, and potentially others depending on the cycle, but the plausible pickup targets are a small set of true battlegrounds. To get to 60 seats, Republicans would have to run the table while simultaneously defending their own vulnerable seats in races that can cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

None of this means Republicans shouldn’t pursue a supermajority. But for those who are serious about engineering a true political revolution, it means acknowledging that the path is narrow, the margin for self-inflicted wounds is close to zero, and the coalition-building has to begin now, not in late 2027.

All of this should force a reckoning about the ability of Republicans to wield power and enact true, permanent change while they have momentum. If a supermajority is unlikely, then organizing a strategy around its eventual arrival is ultimately foolhardy. And if the GOP’s ambition is not marginal reform but lasting change, the Senate rule that demands a supermajority to engineer the political revolution President Trump inaugurated should cease to look like a reasonable guardrail. It must instead be understood as a structural veto that protects the regime the Democrats have constructed.

Reclaiming Congressional Glory

Some may respond by claiming that Republicans do not actually need legislative power to govern. They will say that using reconciliation is sufficient, that executive action can stand in for statutes, or that sympathetic courts can do Congress’s work for it. But none of this holds up if we are to remain a republican system of government.

Reconciliation was never meant to carry the weight some now place on it. It is limited to specific budget categories, boxed in by the parliamentarian, and constantly at risk of collapsing under internal defections. It can shuffle money around and change spending levels, but it cannot rebuild the regime. Agencies cannot be reorganized, and regulations cannot be rewritten via reconciliation. Those who are serious about ensuring that the MAGA agenda continues past 2028 cannot anchor their strategy in a tool designed for cleaning up the deficiencies of mandatory spending.

Executive action is even less reliable. What one administration signs, the next can erase on day one. And those that don’t move quickly get stalled in court or stymied by bureaucrats. Governing this way can be exciting, but it teaches voters that elections are good for changing tone and aesthetics while entrenching the very administrative whiplash conservatives say they want to end.

Courts are no safe substitute for legislation either, as they have helped Democrats build the current regime. Additionally, what courts construct, legislative power can dismantle. A party willing to abolish the filibuster can expand the judiciary, override unfavorable rulings, or neutralize hostile courts. But even under the current system, without any of those changes, judicial outcomes have been unreliable. Republican-appointed judges have repeatedly blocked Trump-era policies through nationwide injunctions and procedural maneuvering. And even headline victories like the fall of the Chevron doctrine have produced little operational change in the Republicans’ favor, as agencies continue to exercise broad discretion and the regulatory state remains largely intact.

If supermajorities are rare, reconciliation is inadequate, executive power is reversible, and courts are unreliable, then the barrier between winning elections and actually governing is the Senate filibuster. Americans are in need of the kind of Congress that our Founders envisioned: jealous of its power, ambitious in its design, and representative of the will of the people. The only way congressional Republicans can begin to recapture the institution’s former glory is to focus on how they can govern with a simple majority. That question leads directly to the filibuster, which President Trump has continually—and rightfully—called to be abolished.

Paralysis in the Senate

Having worked in the Senate for half a decade, I have seen firsthand the useful fiction the Senate filibuster operates under. On paper, legislation passes by a simple majority. But in practice, it requires 60 votes due to cloture. The result is a chamber that requires majoritarianism, but operates under supermajority rule.

Under a 60-vote threshold, winning control of the Senate does not translate into governing authority. It merely permits the initiation of negotiations with a minority that has every incentive to obstruct, delay, and wait it out until the next election. And because a simple majority alone cannot accomplish much, perverse political coalitions begin to form, therefore making party power nominal and control illusory.

Some may object to abolishing the filibuster because it would result in the passage of poor legislation, as Republicans likely can’t rally 51 votes for good legislation. While that criticism identifies a real problem about the character of those we elect to public office, it draws the wrong conclusion. The filibuster does not change the vote count required to pass legislation; it simply grants the minority a procedural veto that prevents bills from ever reaching a vote for final passage without their demands being included. In practice, this often results in GOP leadership negotiating first with Democrats rather than resolving disagreements within their own conference.

Abolishing the filibuster would reverse that order by shifting leverage back inside the Republican conference rather than surrendering it to the Democrats. That process may result in intraparty warfare at times, but it is ultimately healthier. Concessions made to marginal members of one’s own party may strengthen policy, while concessions made to Democrats almost always hollow it out.

If the electorate can deliver a unified government, but the Senate’s internal rules prevent that government from acting, then over time what little legitimacy and confidence is left in Congress will disappear. Voters are told that elections matter, but then they watch as electoral victories fail to produce meaningful outcomes. Cynicism follows. Authority drains away from the legislative branch and flows to the executive branch and the courts, which are not bound by a 60-vote threshold and are far more insulated from public accountability. Ironically, this is precisely the outcome many defenders of cloture and the filibuster claim they are trying to avoid.

Furthermore, instead of abolishing the filibuster altogether, some are promoting a middle ground: the talking filibuster. But that alone won’t engineer a political revolution. Though it feels heroic, as it evokes a romantic vision of the Senate as a place where stamina and rhetoric can change history, it will ultimately fail to produce the needed results. It is at best a tactic the majority may use to exhaust and break the will of the minority. At worst, it’s merely useful for the minority to buy time, shape narratives, or force majoritarian discomfort while taking votes.

A talking filibuster takes time, manpower, and floor discipline—all of which the Senate looks to avoid. This is why GOP leadership has been reticent to pursue the talking filibuster; laziness is an institutional reality. But even then, while the talking filibuster may create discomfort and squeak out a victory here or there, it is ultimately a tactic crafted by institutionalists who pray that the Democrats will keep their word and not abolish the filibuster once they are back in the majority.

Conservatives who feel uneasy about abolishing the filibuster should find comfort in knowing that it is not a constitutional inheritance from our Founders. It is a mutable Senate practice that has been revised, weakened, and selectively abolished whenever it conflicted with governing ambition. Treating it as untouchable is not conservative—it is self-imposed disarmament.

Now it should be recognized that abolishing the filibuster carries risks, especially in a system where control can change hands. But prudence is not the same as paralysis. The relevant question is not whether eliminating the filibuster is dangerous; it is whether the MAGA revolution can succeed if the filibuster is kept intact. With each passing day, it is becoming more apparent that the answer is no.

Those who are serious about enacting a political revolution must align their means and ends. If the end is to govern decisively in a narrow window and to lock in generational reforms before power shifts again, then maintaining a 60-vote choke point makes little sense. It guarantees that even a unified government will be treated as provisional and reversible.

If conservatives truly think that the current regime is badly misaligned with the common good and the will of the American people, then the logic of reform eventually leads to abolishing the Senate filibuster. Trustworthy leadership cannot promise voters renewal and then bind itself to a rule that requires its opponents’ consent to begin that project.

Some conservatives try to avoid this conclusion by telling themselves that Democrats will hesitate to abolish the filibuster when power returns to their hands. That belief is grounded in an assumption that yesterday’s norms will survive tomorrow’s incentives.

The current regime is sustained because one side is willing to use power aggressively while the other continues to act as if old constraints still apply. Republicans may not have written the rules of this regime, but they cannot preserve the American way of life by operating within it. Making America great again requires credible acts of force: the willingness to impose costs using the same tactics Democrats intend to employ.

While the Democrats have not yet abolished the legislative filibuster outright, both parties have already shown multiple times that procedure is negotiable when it stands in the way of objectives they consider essential. After all, the 60-vote threshold was first abolished for executive branch and lower-court nominees, and later extended to Supreme Court confirmations, by Republicans. But the Democrats moved first by bending the existing rules when power demanded it. A Republican Party that believes America is in a civilizational struggle would be foolish to think the Democrats will never abolish a Senate rule that all but guarantees its own paralysis.

There is no serious reason to believe Democrats will treat the legislative filibuster any differently once they reassume power. Unlike Republicans, Democrats do not lack a prepared governing project. Their ambitions are well known and understood. With unified control and a simple majority in the Senate, they could move quickly to change the structure of the chamber itself through statehood expansion, centralizing election administration at the federal level, codifying the Equality Act, enacting mass amnesty to alter the electorate in their favor, and stacking the Supreme Court to neutralize any judicial resistance that may be offered. The idea that Democrats will indefinitely preserve a rule that prevents institutional capture is simply blind hope disguised as prudence.

This is not an argument for impulsiveness from Republicans. It is an argument for prudence. If victory requires governing authority and governing authority is structurally blocked by the 60-vote threshold, then a party intent on change will, sooner or later, be forced to choose between the filibuster and its own stated objectives. If Republicans intend to win, they need to play offense and strike first. Procedure must give way to the use of power on behalf of the American people.

The Crisis of Congressional Will

The only reliable legislative path to fundamentally shifting our politics is through abolishing the filibuster. But if Republicans are serious about victory, then they must first decide what they intend to accomplish before taking such an action. Institutional reform is meaningless without the organizational capacity to exploit it. Absent that, a grim truth remains: the greatest obstacle is not Democrats, courts, or bureaucrats. It is the Republican Party’s own unwillingness to do what is necessary to win.

Tragically at present, there is hardly any Republican in Congress who is even trying to conjure a legislative agenda capable of producing—or even bullying weak Republicans to get—a majority in the House and 51 votes in the Senate. Republicans in Congress have no shared ordering of priorities, no agreed-upon sequence of action, and no disciplined understanding of legislative priorities. The House Freedom Caucus’s (HFC) agenda for 2026 has merited a few news articles but has been lost in the hamster wheel of committee hearings and the news cycle.

Take the SAVE Act, an HFC priority that the president openly supports. It is a straightforward bill that would prohibit non-citizens from voting in federal elections. On its face, this should be the easiest kind of legislation for the Republican Party to unify around. The bill passed the House, but after nearly a year, it remains dormant in the Senate. If the Republican Party cannot pass a bill that does nothing more than restate a common-sense belief that 89% of Americans hold, then what is Congress good for anymore?

As I recently argued in Chronicles Magazine, “Republicans cannot afford to let 2026 pass without pursuing an offensive legislative playbook for our nation’s future.” This means doing all it can to pass a legislative agenda that institutes an immigration moratorium, reindustrializes our economy, makes housing more affordable, eliminates non-citizen receipt of welfare, reestablishes energy independence, ends nationwide injunctions, impeaches judges, and more. Furthermore, the Republican Party must do all it can to build a serious coalition behind more ambitious endeavors like banning pornography, repealing the Civil Rights Act, eliminating federal agencies, incentivizing traditional marriage and ending no-fault divorce, abolishing abortion, and more.

Admittedly, without unity of purpose, abolishing the filibuster may be reckless. And it is precisely this absence of unity that inclines many conservatives to reach for procedural cleverness as a substitute for governing. When the electoral arithmetic is unfavorable, the conservative movement’s instinct is unfortunately not to consolidate and clarify, but to grasp for tactics that feel dramatic, principled, and defiant—even when those tactics burn political capital, waste limited windows of opportunity, and leave the current regime untouched.

But the answer to the question, “What will congressional Republicans do with their power?” if nothing changes is: not much.

Republicans in Congress have grown accustomed to thinking of power as something to be held rather than exercised. Failure is often explained as an inevitability rather than traced back to difficult choices that were never made. Instead, fighting for its own sake is often seen as a victory in and of itself.

Under that mindset, a narrow governing majority becomes a liability rather than an opportunity, all the while the uniparty grows stronger. Without an agreed-upon agenda and a hierarchy of must-pass bills, the opposition will simply wait for the midterm correction that history reliably provides.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

If Republicans want to win the midterms, they need to energize the base, which means passing bold, partisan legislation. Without that, all accomplishments of the Trump Administration will tragically be provisional. This is why the filibuster can no longer be treated as a side debate. It is the central bottleneck between merely holding a majority and actually governing. As long as it remains intact, Republicans can campaign on enacting a political revolution without possessing the institutional tools to deliver it.

If returning to republican government is the goal, as some say, then two things must happen in parallel: the filibuster must be abolished, and a legislative agenda aimed at permanent reform must be assembled and passed. One without the other produces either paralysis or chaos. Together, they create the possibility of generational control.

Will the Republican Party fail the coalition of Americans that President Trump has risked his life building? Or will it finally utilize the institutional leverage and power required to deliver the wins American voters gave Trump the mandate to achieve?

If Congress continues to resist the president’s mandate, refuses to abolish the filibuster, and declines to lock in permanent reforms, then power will drift even further from the legislative branch into the executive branch.

What will follow is not a revitalized republic, but something new. And this form of government will be welcomed by the American people with the expectation that it will be more competent, efficient, and capable of providing the outcomes they desire.

This would not be the system our Founders built. But it is the kind of change that paralysis produces. When the legislative branch refuses to govern, another will step in to fill the vacuum. And over time, Americans will accept it. Not because they may prefer it, but because they are exhausted by the ineptitude of the current system, and because someone is finally willing to act on their behalf.