As I’ve noted, these leadership challenges don’t mean a lot if they don’t include abolishing the filibuster. This afternoon Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), who just announced what remains a fairly longshot challenge to Chuck Schumer, says he supports getting rid of it.
“My personal opinion is that we need democracy in the United States Senate and that means allowing ultimately a majority of senators to answer the call of the American people, so that means 51 votes … My personal view has been all along that the filibuster is an anti-democratic — small “d” — provision. It’s not in our Constitution. It was put in there by senators to enhance their power over the power of the people.”
As you can see he’s framing this as his personal view. But that goes without saying. As I explained, a parliamentary leader isn’t a “decider,” as George W. Bush famously put it. He or she steers where their caucus wants to go. So it’s not a matter of him saying I will do this when I’m leader. But him pretty unequivocally supporting it is a big, big deal.
This is just a general observation. When I first started following the NVIDIA scandal, I had the sense that Jensen Huang was either duped by these cut-out companies sending NVIDIA chips (physically or virtually) to China, or perhaps he was beguiled by Alice Huang, the suspected Chinese spy. But it’s very hard to square that basic take with the various reports we’re seeing.
The attempt to pin the NVIDIA-Huang spy scandal on Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is galloping forward. Earlier today Treasury Scott Bessent went on CNBC and squarely laid the blame on Lutnick for slow-rolling and loosely enforcing export controls on NVIDIA chips. This is no different from the accusations we’ve been hearing about from unnamed sources in numerous reports. But going public and laying blame on CNBC is a whole ‘nother thing. This Journal article goes deeper into the specifics of the accusations, Lutnick’s apparently fairly close relationship to Jensen Huang and other details of this internal administration battle.
TPM’s Untitled Live Show (Name TBD) returns today at 1 p.m. ET. If you think you’ve read all there is to be said about the Nvidia boss’ sex scandal, resignation and the ways in which it makes the Trump administration look wet behind the ears, just wait.
I hope you’ll join Joe, Hunter, Derick and myself this afternoon on YouTube. Come Huang out.
I went back and forth with a number of people yesterday about the filibuster and the leadership contest in the Senate Democratic caucus yesterday. You want Van Hollen because among other reasons, some contended, he gets you closer to getting rid of the filibuster. Don’t be so sure of that. I want to show you something that popped up yesterday in my Twitter feed that is a good example of why. TPM alum Sahil Kapur posted this clip of Bernie Sanders getting asked about the filibuster. The answer isn’t great. I’m not picking on Sanders here. I’m flagging this precisely because Sanders is a key player making this leadership contest possible and people imagine, with some good reason, that Sanders is most willing to upend conventions, take on establishment thinking, etc. It’s an example of how deep filibuster thinking runs.
In her note to TPM over the weekend, Theda Skocpol made a long list of good observations and suggestions about Democrats’ path forward. One of them was deceptively simple: “Stop passing huge kitchen sink bills no one understands and instead pass one at a time popular measures and force Trump to veto them.” This is one of the great lessons of the first two years of the Biden presidency. The lesson stretches back into the Obama years. His administration and congressional Democrats actually went to some lengths to hide Great Recession public relief/stimulus checks in the innards of tax refunds. This should be obvious to everyone by now. One of the perverse side effects of Democrats being the party that is serious about governing is that they tend to think of legislation purely in policy terms. But legislation isn’t just a technocratic fiddling under the hood of the engine of government. It’s a public conversation with voters.
But there’s a catch. There’s another reason they do those huge omnibus bills where no one knows what’s in them. The filibuster. There’s simply no way to do them with the filibuster in place. The only way around the filibuster is the reconciliation process. And you can only do a couple of those a year. Even then, only certain kinds of legislation are allowed. So if the plan for the next two years is to pass a bunch of popular bills and force Republicans to vote against them and Trump to veto them you actually can’t do that because none of that will even get to a vote in the Senate.
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WASHINGTON, DC – JULY 27: U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) speaks during a forum on President Trump’s crypto dealings co-hosted by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) in the Dirksen Senate Office on July 27, 2026 in Washington, DC. Trump and his family have generated about $1.4 billion in revenue from crypto-related businesses, including the $TRUMP meme coin and World Liberty Financial, at the same time that his presidential administration is tasked with regulating the crypto markets in the United States. (Photo by Finn Gomez/Getty Images)
