I was never fond of the Senate filibuster. It could let a minority prevent a majority from having its way. However, recent years have shown it can actually prevent a minority from blocking a majority. Because 1/3 of the Senate seats were filled by the 2014 election, another 1/3 in 2016 and another 1/3 in 2018, the Senate 2019-21 session was filled by those three elections. If you add up all the votes cast for the 100 Democratic candidates in those election years, you get 122.8 million votes. If you add up all the votes for the 100 GOP candidates, you only get 98 million votes. (It’s possible for the GOP to be the Senate “majority” because there are two Senators per state regardless of population.) So, we’ve had a president who lost the popular vote AND a Senate “majority” that lost the popular vote. Therefore, if the GOP had not prevented Democrats from using the filibuster during the last 2 years, those filibusters could have represented a majority of American voters. However, the GOP suspended the filibuster in order to have total minority rule.
I would suggest, if in 2021, the Democrats hold the White House, Senate and House, they enact a federal law which makes it illegal for any Senate “majority” to suspend the filibuster unless it also won the Senate “popular vote.” That would mean changing the rules for filibusters would no longer be purely at the whim of Senators who may not represent the American people.
Of course, such legislation could never pass if a GOP minority was allowed to filibuster. Therefore, it would be necessary to suspend the filibuster at the beginning of the 2021 session. Since the GOP suspended the filibuster when they lost the popular vote for both president and Senate (and were a minority in the House as well,) and I’m speaking of the Democrats suspending the filibuster (perhaps, only for one session) when they win the popular vote, I don’t think this should be an issue.
If Democrats are willing to use the suspension of the filibuster to prevent the GOP from blocking action on the pandemic, climate crisis, the suspension of filibusters by those who lost the popular vote, etc., I would hope this would ease anyone’s concerns about suspending the filibuster.
Of course, Republicans will tell lies about how this is authoritarian action by Democrats — totally ignoring the fact the Republicans started this. But Republicans will tell lies and make baseless claims regardless of what Democrats do, so that should not prevent Democrats from taking action.