Senate Republicans are coming under intense pressure from President Trump and right-wing colleagues to embark on an old-fashioned filibuster fight in an effort to ram through a voter identification bill that their party regards as crucial to salvaging their dimming chances of winning the midterm elections.
The move, which Senator John Thune, the South Dakota Republican and majority leader, has been reluctant to undertake, involves using tactics that haven’t been employed for decades, and could paralyze the Senate indefinitely with no guarantee of success.
But with 50 Republican senators now officially behind the legislation, its backers are escalating calls for their party to force Democrats who have promised to block the bill to wage a so-called talking filibuster. That process would involve occupying the floor continuously and engaging with Republicans in a procedural war of attrition, if they want to prevent the legislation from becoming law.
“It is literally a pressure cooker, and the ball is 100 percent in their court,” Representative Anna Paulina Luna, Republican of Florida and a leading proponent of the legislation, said of G.O.P. senators. “I think at this point in time, even Thune realizes this is kind of a political hand grenade if they don’t act.”
In a recent social media post, Mr. Trump insisted the bill had to pass “one way or the other,” even if it meant resorting to “a Talking Filibuster, à la ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.’”
It would be a stark departure from the sterile way that filibusters are conducted in modern times.
These days, when legislation lacks the requisite support to move, senators skip the extended, full-throated talkathon made famous by the 1939 Jimmy Stewart film. They go straight to a roll-call in which 60 votes are needed for the bill to advance, then quickly move on to something else when it fails, as expected, to clear that bar.
By contrast, the potential round-the-clock activity of a talking filibuster would be punishing for senators who now typically work a three-day week in the Capitol. It would prevent other legislative activity, slow if not halt confirmations, and subject Republicans to politically tricky votes lawmakers toil to avoid in the months before they face voters.
But with Republicans confronting a difficult midterm election environment, G.O.P. proponents of the legislation are now openly saying they cannot maintain control of Congress if they fail to enact the bill. They insist that Republican senators must do whatever it takes to send Mr. Trump legislation that they claim is needed to secure elections against an onslaught of fraudulent voting by undocumented immigrants, though there is no evidence that widespread fraud is taking place.
And a prolonged debate on the measure would give Republicans ample time to press their accusation that the only way Democrats can win the midterms is to cheat, thus preemptively calling into question G.O.P. election losses that appear highly likely.
The bill in question, which passed the House earlier this month, would require voters to show government-issued photo identification at the polls and to prove citizenship to register to vote. It would also give the Department of Homeland Security access to voter rolls. Democrats argue it could disenfranchise millions of voters who lack such documentation, and discourage others from seeking to vote.
Mr. Thune, who recently cosponsored the bill, has promised it will get a vote. But he has not disclosed how he plans to secure one, given that the measure lacks the 60 votes needed to advance. And he has warned about the disruptions that provoking an old-school filibuster could cause, upending his party’s plans in an election year and keeping senators in the Capitol.
“Exercising or triggering a talking filibuster has ramifications, implications, that I think everybody needs to be aware of,” Mr. Thune said earlier this month as he listed proposed bills that could be held up, including housing legislation and farm and highway bills. “The coin of the realm in the Senate is floor time. There’s a finite amount of it, and we have a lot of things we have to do.”
He has also pledged to preserve the legislative filibuster, and would be averse to taking any step that could be perceived as undermining the Senate’s signature procedural weapon through what is called a “nuclear” change in Senate rules or precedents by straight majority vote.
But those pushing him to press ahead on the legislation say there is no need to change the rules if Mr. Thune and Republicans are willing to put Democrats on the spot by requiring adherence to existing ones that have not been enforced since the 1970s and the momentous civil rights bill fights of the 1950s and 1960s.
They worry that Mr. Thune will instead engage in a contemporary filibuster, putting the bill on the floor before it hits a Democratic blockade and stalls.
Under the scenario envisioned by House backers of the legislation, Senate Republicans would instead force Democrats determined to block the legislation to hold the floor and be subject to what is known as the two-speech rule.
Under that limit, each senator is entitled to address a legislative question just twice a day. But even that restriction can lead to weeks of floor time being consumed. And that is before Democrats start throwing out procedural moves that would restart the clock and allow everyone two more speeches. Republicans also would have to keep a continuous presence on the floor to defeat Democratic efforts to prolong debate or kill the bill.
Plus, such a filibuster fight could lead to unlimited amendments being proposed on multiple topics, forcing Republicans to take tough votes on a host of issues in the weeks leading up to the election. It would paralyze the floor and tie up senators who would like to be out campaigning and raising money.
Democrats would not go into the fight unprepared. In 2022, they tried to push through their own election law changes over a Republican filibuster, but came up short when two Democrats defected. Democrats took the more direct “nuclear” approach of trying to change Senate precedents.
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, is planning to hold internal discussions to ready members of his party for whatever Republicans attempt. He has pledged to block the measure, which he derided as “Jim Crow 2.0.”
“It’s turning back the clock 100 years,” Mr. Schumer said. “It comes out of some right-wing mind that certain people shouldn’t vote.”
Despite differences about the procedural approach, nearly all Republican senators are on board with the legislation. The only two who have yet to back it are Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the former longtime party leader, and Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, who has vocally rejected the idea that the federal government should set election rules historically left to the states.
“We are being kind of hypocritical here,” she said in an interview, noting the uniform Republican opposition to the Democratic election proposal four years ago. “We said, ‘You are nationalizing elections, and we don’t do that.’ Now we are doing the exact same thing.”
An overarching issue for Mr. Thune is that procedural experts inside and outside the Senate doubt that a talking filibuster could allow Republicans to get to a final vote on the legislation without forcing changes in Senate precedents and rules, which would leave him open to accusations of breaking his pledge to preserve the legislative filibuster.
Proponents of the talking filibuster point to the 1964 passage of a landmark civil rights bill, which passed after proponents overcame a 60-day blockade by Southern segregationists. But that filibuster was broken when backers of the legislation were able to persuade a supermajority to allow the measure to move forward, with Republicans and Democrats uniting to provide enough votes to cut off the debate.
Such a bipartisan consensus is all but impossible to imagine in this case, given that every Democratic senator save one — John Fetterman of Pennsylvania — is vehemently opposed to the voter ID bill.
Still, Senator Mike Lee, the Utah Republican who has been the chief proponent in the chamber of employing the talking filibuster to pass the legislation, said he had made progress in persuading his colleagues it would be worth the effort.
“Little by little, if people become more familiar with it, they are less spooked by it,” he said.
Some do appear willing to give it a try.
“I’m open to it,” Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said, acknowledging “a lot of practical challenges” that would surface. But the bill, he added, “is worth passing if we can.”
Carl Hulse is the chief Washington correspondent for The Times, primarily writing about Congress and national political races and issues. He has nearly four decades of experience reporting in the nation’s capital.
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