James Talarico sold Republican voters a bipartisan bridge-builder routine all campaign long.
Democrat cheerleaders hailed it as proof their party can still win in red country.
And Talarico barely waited a day to confirm one plan Donald Trump saw coming.
The Same-Team Candidate Picked a Side in Record Time
Senator-elect James Talarico (D-TX) spent the fall assuring skeptical voters he wasn’t one of those Democrats.
At a CNN and Jubilee town hall in October, he told a crowd stocked with Republicans and independents that “This election is not about left versus right.” He branded himself a “border security Democrat.” And when a voter pressed him on abolishing ICE, he said he didn’t support it, adding, “I never have.”
Plenty of people bought the act. Talarico knocked off Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton by double digits and flipped a seat Democrats hadn’t held in more than three decades.
But then the cameras came back on.
NBC News correspondent Ryan Chandler sat down with Talarico right after the win and walked through what he called “three specific allegations based on past comments” from an ad by Elon Musk’s America PAC. First up: would Talarico vote to abolish the filibuster?
“Yes,” Talarico said. “I believe that the majority has the right to govern in this country.”
He kept going. “The filibuster, which is not in the Constitution, it’s a Jim Crow relic,” Talarico said, adding that the rule “is leading the gridlock in our nation’s capital.” He blamed it for Washington’s failure to bring down the cost of groceries, gas, utilities, and health care.
No hedging. No “let’s see what the caucus thinks.” Just a yes, followed by a race card borrowed from Barack Obama.
The rest of the victory lap ran on the same script. On ABC’s The View, Talarico called ICE a “secret police force.” That phrase should sound familiar. Back in January, during a primary debate with US Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), he declared, “It’s time to tear down this secret police force.”
So the town hall Talarico never wanted to abolish ICE, while the primary Talarico and the victory-lap Talarico both want it torn down. Folks can decide for themselves which one will show up for roll calls.
He also declined to commit to backing Chuck Schumer as Democrat leader, leaving the door wide open for the party’s angrier wing. And in a Fox News interview where he talked up working with President Trump on housing and the gas tax, he called on Congress to open more legal pathways for immigrants. A country still struggling to assimilate the newcomers it already has needs bigger numbers like a leaky boat needs a bigger hole.
Bipartisanship, apparently, came with an expiration date stamped on election night.
Barack Obama’s Favorite Insult Comes With an Awkward Calendar
Talarico didn’t invent the “Jim Crow relic” line. Obama road-tested it on July 30, 2020, eulogizing Representative John Lewis inside an Atlanta church. He told mourners Democrats should end the filibuster, “another Jim Crow relic,” if that’s what it took to pass their voting bill. In that same speech, Obama pitched statehood for Washington, DC and Puerto Rico.
Now rewind five weeks.
On June 24, 2020, Senate Democrats used the filibuster to block debate on the JUSTICE Act, a police reform bill written by US Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), the only Black Republican in the chamber. The bill needed 60 votes just to reach the floor. It got 55. Only three members of the Democrat caucus crossed over.
Scott later laid it out plainly. “I extended an olive branch. I offered them amendments. But Democrats used the filibuster to block the debate from even happening.”
In June, the filibuster made a perfectly fine weapon against a Black conservative’s bill. And by late July, it had turned into a monument to segregation. Amazing what five weeks and a shift in the political winds can do.
Obama carried his own baggage on this one, too. As a senator in January 2006, he voted to keep a Democrat filibuster going against Samuel Alito’s Supreme Court nomination. Nobody in his party called that a Jim Crow move.
And the history Talarico skipped doesn’t do his side any favors. The filibuster traces back to an 1806 Senate rules change, generations before anybody heard of Jim Crow. Its most notorious segregation-era use came from Southern Democrats, who tied up the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for 57 working days until Republican leader Everett Dirksen helped round up the votes to break them.
For a man who loves quoting Scripture at Republicans, Talarico seems awfully quiet about the plank in his own party’s eye.
Republicans Left the Loaded Gun on the Table
Donald Trump saw this coming from a mile away.
In an April post on Truth Social, Trump asked “How much abuse can the Republican Senate take from the Radical Left Lunatics in the form of Democrat Senators” before they scrapped the filibuster and passed the SAVE America Act. He warned that Democrats would kill the rule “on the first hour of their first day” in power.
But Senate Majority Leader John Thune shrugged him off. After a breakfast with Trump in November 2025, Thune told reporters ending the filibuster was “not happening,” and this year he insisted the votes simply weren’t there.
So Republicans held the Senate, the House, and the White House, and still left the SAVE America Act, a commonsense bill to make sure only American citizens decide American elections, stranded behind a 60-vote wall. Thune treated the filibuster like a family heirloom. Democrats treat it like a speed bump.
Now the gavel changes hands in January. And the first incoming Democrat put on the spot answered exactly the way Trump predicted.
Talarico frames it as a rule both parties should live without. That sounds awfully high-minded from a man who just joined the majority. Schumer, notably, won’t say publicly where he stands. One freshman just said the quiet part on network television.
The Shopping List Behind 51 Votes
Talarico sold the idea as a way to shrink grocery bills. Obama, standing at that pulpit in 2020, gave the more honest version of the shopping list.
Two new states would let a Democrat Congress mint four new Democrat senators with a simple vote, without winning a single new argument at the ballot box. A bare majority could bolt extra seats onto the Supreme Court and hand the Left a bench built to order. Amnesty for illegal aliens, rebranded as “legal pathways,” would swap out the electorate a few million green cards at a time. Gun restrictions that keep dying at 60 votes would sail through at 51.
Texas already shows where that road leads. Years of heavy immigration reshaped the state, and the payoff just arrived in the form of the first Democrat statewide win in more than 30 years. Amnesty would stamp that same transformation onto the whole country.
True enough, none of that gets past Donald Trump’s veto pen before January 2029. But Senate rules don’t expire when a President leaves. Whatever this majority tears down stays torn down for whoever moves into the Oval Office next.
Maybe Talarico honestly believes 51 votes will bring down the price of eggs. Maybe. But the party writing the new rulebook has spent years telling everyone what it plans to pass first, and egg prices never made the top of the list.
The filibuster’s real Jim Crow chapter had a Democrat at the podium.
On the morning of June 10, 1964, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia finished a 14-hour, 13-minute speech aimed at killing the Civil Rights Act. He later said he regretted it. In 1977, his fellow Senate Democrats elected him Majority Leader.
Sources: Breitbart News; Daily Wire; Democracy Now; Axios Houston; CNN; The Hill; Fox News; Daily Signal; WFMD; Breitbart News (The View clip); PolitiFact; CBS News; The Hill (June 2020); PBS NewsHour/AP; Common Dreams; National Review; US Senate Historical Office; The Morning News; 2paragraphs; AP.