As everyone from President Joe Biden to conservative Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin to liberal groups now pushes to reform the Senate’s rules, the defense of the filibuster goes something like this: by design, our nation is a republic, not a direct democracy, and therefore we must create institutional obstacles to empower a minority of Americans to prevent the whims of the majority from being too hastily enshrined in legislation. By this logic, we must keep the Senate’s cloture rule, which requires sixty of the Senate’s one hundred members to end a filibuster and move a bill to a vote.

Those who make this case seem to love sounding like erudite constitutional scholars steeped in the grandeur of American history, and they purport to be pluralists worrying about minority rights.

“Letting the majority do everything it wants to is not what the Founders had in mind,” said Senate Republican whip John Thune in a floor speech defending the filibuster this week. “The Founders recognized that it wasn’t just kings who could be tyrants. They knew majorities could be tyrants, too, and that a majority, if unchecked, could trample the rights of the minority. . . . So the Founders . . . created the Senate as a check on the House of Representatives.”