Donald Trump—juggling a war that shows more signs every week of dragging on far longer than he imagined, a nation of enraged air travelers, and a day of protests against him that was the largest of its kind in American history—is still making time to attack American democracy. He’s leaning hard on Senate GOP leader John Thune to ditch the filibuster and pass the party’s voter-suppression bill, the SAVE America Act. The president posted late last week: “When is ‘enough, enough’ for our Republican Senators. There comes a time when you must do what should have been done a long time ago, and something which the Lunatic Democrats will do on day one, if they ever get the chance. TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER, and get our airports, and everything else, moving again. Also, add the complete, all five items, SAVE AMERICA ACT items. Go for the Gold!!!”I have less than no use for the SAVE America Act. Like a lot of liberals I know, I’d be fine with a reasonable law that required voters to present ID. But this bill isn’t that. Under such a reasonable law, for example, a driver’s license should constitute valid ID. Under this bill, however, a regular driver’s license—which is the standard issue of 45 states, with only five states offering the Enhanced Driver’s License that the act deems kosher—would not suffice. That’s absurd. More importantly, the act is—as many have pointed out, including Norman Ornstein on this website—effectively a poll tax, requiring registered voters to reregister with proof of citizenship. (Do you even know where your birth certificate is? Do you still live in the same state where you were born?) The idea of requiring an ID to vote polls very well, but the act itself, once people are informed of the specifics, does far less well. Besides all that, it’s a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Even the Heritage Foundation, creator of an “Election Fraud Map” presumably designed with the intent of raising the alarm about this alleged pestilence, could find only 1,620 cases of people being criminally convicted or paying a civil penalty for voter fraud—going back to 1982. How many Americans have voted since 1982? It has to be several billion. And even a right-wing outfit with a clear agenda couldn’t scrape up even 2,000 offenders!So it would be awful for the country and for democracy if the SAVE America Act passed. And it would be, on one level, appalling to watch Thune cave to Trump one more time and nuke the filibuster (which he reportedly is not of a mind to do). And yet … even though it would cause some short-term pain, in the long run I’d love to see the GOP nuke the filibuster. You should too, and here’s why.Basically, liberalism and the Democratic Party have a long list of legislative achievements they’d like to pass into law. On wages, the economy, federal benefits, health care, primary and secondary education, higher education, the environment, monopoly power, tech power, and so much more, there are bills sitting around in Congress that various Democrats have dutifully written. They’re mostly pretty good. Some—in fact, I’d say most—have a Republic cosponsor or two. Conservatism and the Republican Party, by contrast, have no such agenda and are sitting on no such trove of bills. Their domestic agenda can be summed up in five words: reduce taxes and cut regulation. Sure, there are a few other things: Throw out immigrants, keep boys out of girls’ sports, and of course crack down on an epidemic (voter fraud) that doesn’t exist. But that’s about it for them. Meanwhile, the Democrats—the party of government—want, quite logically, the government to do a lot of things.Now imagine that it’s January 21, 2029, and somehow it has come to pass that we have a Democratic president, 53 Democratic senators (with nary a Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema in the bunch), and 229 Democratic House members. Full control of government, in other words.What could these majorities do? Well, with the filibuster in place—which requires 60 senators to overcome—not much of anything, really. Oh, they’d pass a few things, as Joe Biden managed to. But it would be pulling teeth the whole way, and the American public would mostly see more dysfunction. And dysfunction always, always, always benefits the party of anti-government, because all they need to do is point their fingers and say, “Look? See what a mess the federal government is?”Now let’s ask ourselves what these hypothetical majorities could do if there were no filibuster, and they could pass bills in both houses with simple majorities. It would depend on how aggressive they want to be—more on which later—but assuming a reasonable level of zeal to do what they came to Washington to do and pass laws that make people’s lives better, they could pass bill after bill after bill.First, they could undo the SAVE America act and pass their own voting rights law. Then starts the real work. An $18 minimum wage, and indexed to inflation so that Congress never has to hike it again—done.