There is a lot of discussion now as to whether the Senate filibuster should be eliminated or kept. A critical underlying problem is the Senate’s composition being made up of two Senators per state regardless of a state’s population. We’ve seen in recent years that if you add up all the votes received by all 100 Democratic Senate candidates, and add up all the votes for all 100 Republican Senate candidates, the Republican candidates can get less than 45% of the nationwide votes and still have more than 50 seats in the Senate.
This has allowed the GOP to restrict Democrats’ use of the filibuster, even though the Republicans were supported by a minority of voters. So, if the filibuster could be used, it could be a voters’ majority filibustering a voters’ minority. That could be better than simply letting a voters’ minority do whatever they want.
On the other hand, there can be years in which a majority of voters chose Democrats AND Democrats hold a majority of Senate seats, but they are prevented from passing legislation if voters’ minority (the Republicans) are able to filibuster.
I don’t think the choice has to be between totally keeping or totally eliminating the filibuster. Why not have a rule that says those Senators who want to hold a particular filibuster against a particular bill must have received votes from a nationwide majority of voters? Or some such rule that allows filibusters based on percentage of voters rather than number of Senate seats.
This will still be imperfect as long as voter suppression / discouragement is allowed to affect what the nationwide Senate vote totals are. But it won’t be possible to restrict voter suppression as long as the current filibuster rules continue. And that is why changes to the filibuster are needed.