Of course, if you're going to filibuster a must-pass bill, you need to have a reason to filibuster the must-pass bill. Which is tough, because must-pass bills are usually tailored to avoid things that will keep them from passing.

Sticks in my mind that "must pass" bills are the popular choice to carry something that would be poison by itself. In principle, I like a "line item veto", tho, iirc, it was declared unconstitutional, at the Federal level, some years ago.

Back when I had cable, I caught a debate on C-SPAN one evening in November. The House had passed the conference committee's final iteration of an "omnibus spending bill", passed it to the Senate, and gone home for Thanksgiving. The Dems in the Senate expected a land mine in that 1000+ page bill, so divided the printed version up into digestible sections, and had all their combined staffs go through it with a fine tooth comb. They found something. Someone in the conference committee had slipped a provision in that gave the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee authority to send staff over to the IRS, to go sifting through a person's tax returns, with no warrant or probable cause. The Dems were livid. The Repubs kept saying "we need to pass this bill now. we can't send it back to the House to be changed, because the House recessed. we'll fix this provision later" The Dems weren't buying it. Does that sound a lot like the current situation? I don't recall now how they settled that row. This, of course, was during the Bush junta, which regarded the Constitution as "nothing but a G-D piece of paper"

But it leaves the Democrats in this weird place, where the thing they're fighting about isn't really top of mind for a lot of voters, and where the smart political play probably would have been to let the GOP stew in their own pot.

Well, is that about what I said? The numbers have been posted here before. The subsidies in question only benefit a minority of voters. Don't obstruct the MAGAs getting what they voted for. See how they like it.

Steve