(Daily Signal)—A bipartisan Senate duo claims it has the answer to “Save the Senate.” The proposal to eliminate cloture votes, limit dead floor time, increase debate time, and create multiple “fast-tracks” for bills could allow the Senate to pass more legislation.
The rule changes, proposed by retiring Republican Sen. Steve Daines of Montana and Democrat Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, seek to limit dead floor time, limit omnibus bills and backroom deals, and move legislation faster, much like the lower chamber. Their goal is to get the proposal passed before Daines departs and the new Congress convenes in January.
“More bills passed, more votes taken, less time wasted. That sums up,” Daines said in a Semafor interview with Merkley announcing the proposal.
Overall, the proposed rules address one of the greatest frustrations many have with the Senate: The chamber doesn’t accomplish much.
According to House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Republicans have passed “700 bills that are sitting in the Senate, including the SAVE America Act and a ban on members of Congress trading stock.” Just a few weeks ago, the Senate spent nearly two weeks working to pass the College Sports Bill.
What often holds the Senate back is the cloture vote, the requirement for 60 votes needed to end a filibuster.
The senators propose reducing dead floor time to allow more time for votes. They want to eliminate the 60-vote requirement, known as the cloture vote, for some routine business and procedural votes and eliminate the “intervening day,” the full calendar day between filing and voting. They also want to reduce the 30-hour waiting period, called post-cloture consideration, to allow more time to pass legislation.
The senators want to establish a “fast-track” process to allow committee-passed bills to pass on the Senate floor with a two-thirds vote. Committee chairs and ranking members would be involved in the process. A second fast-track process would be created for legislation out of the Appropriations Committee, the yearly bills that appropriate taxpayers’ money. There would be “extensive opportunity” for amendments and specific rules for bipartisan bills.
Fears It Will ‘Strengthen the Swamp’
Sen. Mike Lee told the Daily Signal he has some concerns with the proposed rules, specifically citing the removal of procedural hurdles for appropriators.
“I’m concerned that this proposal would have many of the downsides of eliminating the filibuster and none of the upsides,” Lee said.
“Allowing Senate appropriators to spend taxpayer dollars with fewer procedural hurdles strengthens the Swamp instead of draining it,” he continued.
But for now, the proposal is just that, a proposal.
The two senators’ goal is to finish the initial draft this month, hold member meetings in November and December, and seek support during the period between the election and the new Congress known as the lame-duck session. Daines and Merkley are both pushing for a vote during the lame-duck session. They only need 67 senators on board to change Senate rules, but they are seeking full support.
“Senator Daines is seeking support across the Republican conference, the ideological spectrum, and the seniority spectrum—from a committee chairman to a first-term senator,” Daines’ office told the Daily Signal.
“We have met with multiple senators’ staff across our ideological spectrum and across our seniority spectrum, and absolutely that includes Steering [Committee],” the office said.
“Conversations will substantially increase as we try to grow support, fine tune, finish the product, and grow support for the product in the next two and a half months or two months.”
Ryan Wrasse, spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader John Thune, told Semafor, “Thune is always open to discussing ways to make the Senate function in a more effective and efficient way, and he applauds Sen. Daines for thinking outside the box. Since no rules change can be implemented unilaterally, building a bipartisan consensus will be key to any modification of the existing process.”
Daines also told Semafor that they “got a thumbs up on it” from key players in the White House.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
