The filibuster is here to stay, for now.

And that’s posing a challenge to President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress confronting a wall of Republican opposition led by Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s “100%” focus on stopping their agenda.

This week’s defeat of an ambitious elections bill showed how far lawmakers and advocates have come in focusing attention on the cumbersome Senate rules, in place for decades, that require 60 votes to advance most legislation. In a short while, they’ve lifted the filibuster out of the procedural backwaters into the political mainstream, changing senators’ minds and showing how the rules can and will be used to halt Biden’s goals.

Yet the grueling work of unifying all 50 Democrats in the Senate around a strategy to change the filibuster is just beginning. It’s not just Sen. Joe Manchin or Sen. Kyrsten Sinema the reformers will need to persuade to do away with the practice. Biden has been cool to filibuster changes, and as many as 10 Democratic senators have quietly expressed reservations, though their numbers appear to be diminishing as frustration mounts over Republican obstruction.