Why reform the filibuster?
In the short weeks since the election, the Big Lie and invasion of the Capitol, Democrats in Congress and Republicans in State Legislatures have set up an existential confrontation over voting rights.

Republicans Restrict Voter’s Rights
In at least 43 States, Republicans have introduced over 250 new laws that reduce and restrict early voting and mail balloting, make it easier to purge voter rolls and tighten ID requirements for voting.  This is the most sweeping contraction of voting rights since post-Civil War Reconstruction.  These new Jim Crow laws are aimed at suppressing the vote of People of Color.  They make voting harder for low-income people, old and disabled people, non-drivers, students, former prisoners and rural people.
Here’s what Republicans passed in Georgia alone: https://truthout.org/articles/georgia-republicans-pass-sweeping-bill-restricting-voting-rights/

Democrats Expand Voter’s Rights
House Democrats have passed HR1, the For the People Act, and  HR4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which is an update of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. These measures expand voter access, limit partisan gerrymandering, overhaul campaign finance rules, reinstate a process for overseeing voting changes in places that discriminated in the past,  and more. The Supreme Court in 2010 in the Citizens United case cleared the way for unlimited and secret money in elections.  Then in 2013 in Shelby County vs Holder, they eviscerated the Voting Rights Act. The For the People Actand the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act reverse the effect of these anti-democratic Supreme Court decisions.

Will voting rights die in the Senate?  Yes.
If the filibuster rule is not changed, voting rights have no chance of becoming law.
As Stacy Abrams says, “The courts will not save us.”  It is likely that the present Supreme Court will allow many of the new voting restrictions.

What’s the filibuster?
The filibuster is not in the Constitution.  The Senate makes its own rules and the filibuster is a Jim Crow era rule that allows just one Senator to prevent any measure from getting a vote.  It functions as a minority veto.  Historically, it has allowed the party in the minority to block the majority party.  In practice, it has taken away majority rule and in recent years made a super-majority of 60 votes necessary to pass anything.
The good news is that changes to Senate rules require only a majority vote of 50 Senators.  In recent years, the filibuster rule has been changed to carve out exceptions: Budget items are exempt (and that is why the Covid Rescue Plan has passed without a single Republican vote).  Presidential Cabinet nominations are also exempt.

The filibuster exemption for Federal District Court Judicial nominations was first passed with leadership from Harry Reid in 2013.  But it later allowed Trump to appoint 245 Judges. Mitch McConnell led a further change early in Trump’s term that allows confirmation of Supreme Court nominees with less than 60 votes, resulting in the three most recent Justices, two confirmed by just one vote majorities.

Proposals for change
Stacy Abrams proposes a narrowly-tailored change to the filibuster that could win 50 votes from Democrats and possibly even a few Republican votes.  She suggests  that legislation protecting voting rights should also be exempt from the 60-vote requirement.   https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/03/stacey-abrams-has-a-plan-to-dismantle-the-filibuster-and-protect-voting-rights/

Abrams says that all exemptions to the filibuster are grounded in the Constitutional principle that there are certain responsibilities that only Congress can meet and that guaranteeing the right to vote is one of these.

President Obama, speaking at John Lewis’ funeral last year said that in his honor the “Jim Crow relic” filibuster should be eliminated altogether.

Where do Senators stand?
Here’s a partial survey of Democratic Senators as of March 8, by the Washington Post, that shows that nineteen have already stated that they support ending the “Jim Crow Filibuster” altogether, and 18 more are open to changing it.
Seven are skeptical about making any change, two of whom we helped elect: Jacky Rosen (Dem-NV) who repeated her opposition to any change on March 8, 2021 and Mark Kelly (Dem-AZ) who has been dodging questions about his stand on this issue.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/08/calls-end-filibuster-have-bigger-problems-than-joe-manchin/

This is a chance to act as allies to Black leadership on voting rights:
Here is  Stacy Abrams’ https://fairfight.com/how-to-help/ list of state-level politicians to call.
The National Basketball Association players, led by Le Bron James, whose More Than A Vote campaign helped to increase the vote, have launched a Protect Our Power campaign : https://www.morethanavote.org/  in response to the attack on voting rights.

To reform or eliminate the filibuster?
Two camps are forming on this question.  A strong argument in favor of eliminating it totally is that exempting Voting Rights from the filibuster will not help to pass the many other measures we need.  For example, a sweeping new law just passed in the House protecting unions and expanding worker’s rights also has no chance in the Senate.  Labor leaders have endorsed ending the filibuster altogether: https://thehill.com/regulation/labor/542829-afl-cio-calls-for-filibuster-rules-the-change
What about urgently-needed action on climate change, student debt, immigration, infrastructure, and so much more?  To move forward on those the filibuster must end.

The arguments against  ending the filibuster and limiting change to reform look at the history of progressives using the filibuster to block repressive measures by the right.   During Trump, Democrats in the Senate used it to block funding for Trump’s border wall and to block weakening of abortion rights and to force more money into bills for Covid relief.  Ending the filibuster altogether could hurt progressive causes if Republicans regain the majority.

Let Trevor Noah, late-night comic, explain it to you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LPoGcUJnnA  (20 minutes…There’s an ad at the start you can skip.)