by WorldTribune Staff, March 25, 2026 Non-AI Real World News

To avoid a complete government-wide shutdown, Republicans kept Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding out of a spending resolution and Democrats provided the necessary votes to fund the rest of the government.

“Since then, Democrats have refused to budge on any deal that includes one penny for ICE. The shutdown is causing massive headaches for Americans – and is imperiling national security to boot – but Democrats are downright giddy about it,” Shane Harris wrote in a March 24 analysis for the Amac Newsline.

“The mainstream media has entirely missed what a seismic moment this is in American politics,” Harris wrote. “There have been whole or partial government shutdowns due to the minority party using the filibuster before, but this is something different entirely.”

Harris continued: “Democrats are effectively weaponizing the filibuster to exercise a legislative veto over the executive branch enforcing the law in a manner that a majority of the American public voted for just 16 months ago. This is a new precedent that has opened the door to mass chaos in the future.”

Democrats controlled both the House of Representatives and the Senate during the first two years of the Biden-Harris regime (2021–2023), during the 117th Congress.

If Republicans did then what Democrats are going now, legacy media would have daily outrage articles.

“Imagine if Senate Republicans had employed this strategy during the Biden years. The GOP could have simply picked any Democrat agency they didn’t like – say, the FBI for targeting conservatives and Christians – and used the filibuster to block funding until the Biden Administration and congressional Democrats agreed to policy changes in writing,” Harris noted. “In that case, this underhanded strategy actually would have been morally justified. But one can only imagine the media outrage about ‘norms’ and ‘democratic accountability.’ ”

Republicans are also fooling themselves if they think showing an restraint now will be of any consequence to Democrats in the future, Harris noted.

“The filibuster itself is not an untouchable institution. The current ‘silent filibuster’ – where any senator can block most legislation indefinitely unless 60 senators vote to move forward on it – only emerged in the 1970s. Before that, senators had to physically hold the floor and speak if they wanted to block a bill. That was known as the ‘talking filibuster’ – what most Senate Republicans want to use now to pass the SAVE America Act.”

In 2022, it was only the opposition of moderate Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona that prevented Democrats from abolishing the filibuster. Manchin and Sinema have both since retired from the Senate.

“It is difficult to envision any current Senate Democrat opposing a push to abolish the filibuster, a change which would only require 51 votes,” Harris noted.

What are Republicans to do?

“Using the talking filibuster to pass the SAVE America Act would be a good start. But perhaps even more important than that is keeping control of the House and Senate this November and then taking a long, hard look at what policies they could potentially pass without a silent filibuster,” Harris wrote. “Republicans should be sober-minded and clear-eyed about what Democrats intend to do if they win back the Senate, and act now to preempt the damage their agenda would do to the country, along with passing conservative policies that Senate Democrats have long blocked.”

Harris added: “Ask yourself this: If a party that can’t win at the ballot box is able to take an entire government agency hostage to try to force the executive branch to not enforce immigration law, do we still live in a democracy?”

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  Unreported: Democrats’ precedent-shattering DHS shutdown introduced the legislative veto, WorldTribune.com