President Donald Trump has made his position clear: He wants Senate Republicans to nuke the legislative filibuster and push through a sprawling voter ID bill.

It’s enough to make some Republicans think twice before leaping to the filibuster’s defense, as the arcane details of Senate procedure spark strong emotions and bitter online feuds. But others are taking a different approach.

“I’m going to make myself a T-shirt that says, ‘No, I’m not interested in blowing up the filibuster,’” Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska joked last week.  

And Sen. John Curtis of Utah drew a line in the sand Thursday, writing in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, “Under no circumstance will I support any effort to end or alter the filibuster, as any party that does so wouldn’t be guaranteed survival.” 

“Their agenda would be guaranteed death come the next majority,” he said, defending the tool as critical for preserving debate and compromise in the Senate.

For Majority Leader John Thune, the equation is not new: The math isn’t mathing, and there has never been enough support in his conference to establish a new precedent and lower the 60-vote hurdle most bills must clear to advance to a simple majority threshold. 

Those numbers are hardly a secret, but some are reluctant to take a public stance when it means defying the party’s president. Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., told Politico this summer that more Republicans oppose the so-called nuclear option than are willing to say so. 

“I regret that the other 25 or 30 people who oppose blowing up the filibuster don’t say it out loud like I do, because it leaves the impression that there are only four or five of us, just enough so that he doesn’t have 51,” Cramer said.

Cramer may be starting to get his wish, as members like Curtis put their stances in writing and try to explain their thinking to the public in detail.

As Trump grows increasingly frustrated that the Senate cannot move his prized elections overhaul bill, dubbed the SAVE America Act, he has cast the legislative filibuster as something that could be easily and instantly thrown aside. 

The fight is not a new one. Both parties have tried to turn the Senate’s rules and practices to their advantage, with Democrats under Majority Leader Harry Reid ending the 60-vote threshold for most presidential nominees in 2013, and Republicans doing the same for Supreme Court nominees in 2017.

But the filibuster for legislation has remained intact. In 2017, a bipartisan group of 61 senators, led in part by Susan Collins of Maine, penned a letter urging then-Leader Mitch McConnell to preserve it.

“We are united in our determination to preserve the ability of Members to engage in extended debate when bills are on the Senate floor,” they wrote.

Of that group, more than a dozen of the Republicans are still serving in the Senate today. That includes Thune. 

“That must be a different form of math,” Thune said Wednesday of Trump’s insistence the majority leader has the votes to pass the SAVE America Act. 

Also included on that nearly decade-old letter is Utah Sen. Mike Lee, who has reversed his position and now is leading the charge in the Senate on Trump’s elections bill and on abolishing the legislative filibuster to get it done. 

Flip-flopping on the filibuster also isn’t new. Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, for example, who campaigned in 2022 to eliminate it, called his previous stance “horribly wrong.”  

“Upon reflection, the pursuit of those short-term wins clouded the bigger picture and lasting impact of a Senate without the filibuster — a Senate that ignored the voices of the minority and everyday people,” Fetterman wrote in a Washington Post op-ed last week, calling the filibuster a “critical line of defense that prevents President Donald Trump from having a fill-in-the-blank government with new laws, deregulation or procedures of its choosing.”

“Trump’s victory and Republicans taking control of both chambers of Congress quickly showed how chaotic a simple majority vote could be in the Senate,” he wrote.

Another senator whose position has shifted is Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who in March came out in support of ditching the filibuster, saying the elections bill mattered more. It’s not clear whether his tensions with Trump — who endorsed his primary opponent, Ken Paxton — may end up shutting that door again.

On Friday, as the defeated Cornyn serves out the remaining months of his term, he took to social media to share Curtis’ filibuster defense, posting a link to his colleague’s op-ed — titled “I Won’t Change the Filibuster” — without any comment.