If the Democrats’ theme of 2017 was Resistance, the theme for Democrats in 2025 needs to instead be Opposition. Outgoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) may be the models to emulate.

It may seem unusual that man widely regarded as the sole reason the US Senate is broken should be heralded as an example for Senate Democrats, let alone the senator that put national security at risk by stalling promotions of top military officials for the better part of a year. However, if Democrats have any hope of halting President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda, there’s no better archetype than these two Senate Republicans.

Even though McConnell has since ceded his position to incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota), his tenure has exposed all the faults the US Senate has as an institution and Democrats hoping to frustrate the Trump White House should take notes. Any effective opposition will be one in which Democrats stall the machinery of the Senate to a standstill and prevent any legislation from passing without 60 votes.

And as Tuberville showed, there is also an important procedural trick Democrats have up their sleeve — denying unanimous consent — that can be deployed to prevent Trump’s legislative agenda from coming to fruition if they have the wherewithal to use it. It’s critical for Democrats to understand that even though a term-limited Trump is coming into power with Republican control of the House, Senate, and a 6-3 far-right Supreme Court supermajority, they have the ability to minimize the damage Trump can do in his second term if they unite across factions and act strategically.

How Democrats can learn from McConnell’s example

McConnell’s time as both minority leader and majority leader has proven to be historic. He single handedly stole former President Barack Obama’s third Supreme Court appointment and later bragged about it as the “most consequential” moment of his career. He made it his mission to help Trump confirm hundreds of Article III judges to lifetime appointments during his first administration. And he was a pioneer in exploiting the Senate filibuster to make sure the past two Democratic presidents were severely limited in what they could accomplish.

The Senate is different from the House of Representatives in that rather than bills having a simple up-or-down vote after emerging from their respective committee, a single member of the Senate can invoke a “cloture” motion to prevent the body from moving to a strict up-or-down majority vote on legislation in order to engage in further debate. This requires 60 votes to overcome, meaning almost all bills can be stalled indefinitely without 60 votes. 

As Senate.gov’s record shows, the number of cloture motions more than doubled from 68 in the 109th Congress to 139 in the 110th Congress, once outgoing Senate Minority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tennessee) passed the reins to McConnell. Cloture motions only increased with each subsequent meeting of Congress. When Democrats recaptured the Senate majority in 2021, the number of cloture motions filed jumped to 336. Essentially, McConnell made it so almost every bill that arrived in his chamber was doomed to fail unless it cracked the 60 vote threshold.

McConnell’s intransigence was on full display in the 116th Congress, when Democrats recaptured the House majority after the 2018 blue wave midterm elections. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) referred to the Kentucky Republican as the “grim reaper” of the Senate. House Democrats had passed nearly 400 bills, yet as majority leader of the Senate, McConnell simply refused to bring any of those bills up for a vote. These bills included legislation funding new infrastructure projects, curbing price hikes for prescription drugs, expanding voting rights, and tackling climate change, among others. 

“It's not that we're not doing anything. It's that we're not doing what the House Democrats and these candidates for president on the Democratic ticket want to do,” McConnell said in February of 2020.

In order to overcome the 60-vote cloture hurdle, Democrats were only able to shepherd through President Joe Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act through a process called “budget reconciliation.” This allows for a bill to pass the Senate with just 50 votes (with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote) provided it’s limited to budgetary matters. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported, reconciliation was used sparingly by previous administrations: Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump and George W. Bush used it to pass tax cut packages that primarily benefited the rich; Barack Obama used it to pass the Affordable Care Act, and Bill Clinton used it to cut welfare. 

Trump will likely lean on reconciliation again for a potential new round of tax cuts that could cost up to $4.6 trillion over 10 years. But if he hopes to repeal Biden’s legacy-defining bills or scrap the Affordable Care Act, it’s not likely that Senate rules will allow for those legislative pushes to be done via reconciliation. Notably, after Thune was elected by his fellow Republicans to lead the Senate GOP Conference, he made it clear that the filibuster would remain in place, signaling that the incoming Republican majority will still keep the tools available for Democrats that McConnell used to sink Democratic legislation.

“Senators have a tendency to defend their power, just like everybody else does. I don’t know a lot of wimps in the United States Senate,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-North Dakota) told NBC News in November. “I think we’ve all lived through the possibility of losing the filibuster as a tool to defend. And I would be surprised if there were enough Republicans who thought that we should change it now.”

Democrats should enthusiastically embrace Tommy Tuberville’s tactics

In 2023, Tuberville — the former Auburn University football coach who had never once held elected office prior to becoming a US senator —  made headlines for single handedly blocking more than 300 critical military promotions. His blockade lasted roughly 10 months, and was ostensibly done out of protest for the Pentagon’s policy of reimbursing the travel costs of service members who have to travel out of state to receive abortion care (specifically traveling from a state that banned abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022).

Tuberville’s blockade was so destructive that it may have been a contributor to General Eric Smith, who is the commandant of the Marine Corps, suffering a heart attack that left him hospitalized for several days. Smith had been taking on the workload of both the commandant and the assistant commandant, given that Senate confirmation of the official who had been tapped to be Smith’s top deputy was being held up by the Alabama senator. 

“This is outrageous,” an unnamed senior DOD official told Politico at the time. “I cannot help but think — because at the end of the day, Eric Smith is a human — that Tuberville’s unnecessary stress that he’s put in the situation where you don’t have a backup … has added a level of complexity and danger to an already bad situation.”

As NPR reported, Tuberville was able to grind hundreds of military promotions to a complete halt for 10 months simply by denying unanimous consent. In the Senate, both parties agree on “unanimous consent rules” that dictate how business is conducted in the chamber for that particular meeting of Congress. The late Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-West Virginia), who served in his role for 51 years, once estimated that roughly 98% of the Senate’s actions happen through the unanimous consent process. And McConnell once joked that the Senate requires unanimous consent to “turn the lights on before noon.”

This means that any single member of the Senate can bring the entire chamber to a standstill by denying unanimous consent, saying they prefer “extended debate” on any particular measure. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), for example, could frustrate the New GOP majority by denying unanimous consent for even the most basic procedures. Sanders in particular has virtually unlimited political capital to spend on obstructing Trump’s agenda in the Senate, as he was just reelected to another six-year term from one of the safest Democratic states in the country.

As Adam Jentleson — a former aide to now-retired Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) — wrote in the Washington Post in 2017, Democrats could deny unanimous consent on any Trump appointee for up to four days apiece. And because there are roughly 1,000 positions that require Senate confirmation, Senate Democrats have no limit on opportunities to slow everything down to a snail’s pace.

But denying unanimous consent isn’t a strategy unique to Tuberville: In 2010, at the height of the Great Recession that followed the 2008 financial crisis, then-Senator Jim Bunning (R-Kentucky) repeatedly denied unanimous consent for a 30-day extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless that were set to expire. Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) asked Bunning to relent after his continued denials, with the Kentucky Republican simply responding with: “Tough shit.” If Democrats choose to embrace this tactic in 2025, they should have the exact same response when Republicans complain that they aren’t able to ram through Trump’s Cabinet picks.

The House will also be a critical venue for Democratic opposition

The rules of the House of Representatives are far less arcane and convoluted than the Senate, and Republicans are coming into 2025 with a majority. However, their razor-thin majority will almost certainly be put to the test for contentious legislation, and Democrats can exploit that to their advantage.

As of right now, Republicans have just a 219-215 majority, as former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) resigned from Congress after Trump nominated him to be attorney general (Gaetz withdrew from consideration just eight days after he was nominated). But that majority will soon shrink to just one seat after the new Congress is sworn in on January 3, depending on when two Republicans tender their resignations to join the Trump administration.

If Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-New York) and Mike Waltz (R-Florida) both end up serving as United Nations ambassador and National Security Advisor, respectively, that will peg the Republican majority at just 217-215. If even one Republican joins a united Democratic opposition, that would kill any legislation, as a bill cannot pass on a 216-216 tie. Their vacancies will be filled via special election, and because they are both from safe Republican districts, it’s likely the slim majority will hold. But it will be incredibly difficult for the House Republican Conference to pass any legislation with such a slim majority.

Moreover, individual representatives are very sensitive to constituent calls, and individual residents calling their representatives can have a very pronounced impact on whether certain legislation passes or fails. As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D- New York) posted to Bluesky, HR 9495 (which allows for the IRS to strip any nonprofit of its tax-exempt status if the Treasury secretary deems it a terrorist organization) initially had 52 Democratic supporters. But after a wave of phone calls from engaged constituents, that number dropped to just 15.

We should all be clear-eyed about the very dangerous implications Trump’s second term has for marginalized communities, immigrants, and the working class. He will undoubtedly do profound damage to those groups and to our institutions as a whole that will take years to undo, and as president, he will make numerous foreign policy decisions that Congress and the courts will be unable to stop. But one major takeaway from this election should be that Democrats still have the numbers to put up a big fight in Congress, and that they can stymie a significant chunk of his legislative agenda if they’re willing to commit to four years of steadfast opposition. And if Democrats start to relent in their opposition, constituents should know they have the power to take a few minutes every day to call their office and remind them of their duty. 

Carl Gibson is a journalist whose work has been published in CNN, USA TODAY, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, the Louisville Courier-Journal, Barron’s, Business Insider, the Independent, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Bluesky @crgibs.bsky.social.