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I'm pretty sure one reason why they keep the filibuster around is that it's a great way to keep votes from happening that they don't want without everyone having to tip their hand and vote against.
Discourse around politics love to treat idealogies as a hivemind but the reality is that there's a lot of disagreement between people who are otherwise allied with each other. Even without the filibuster why should we expect a Trump tariff bill to pass? Democrats are opposed to Trump having more power and (this might be shocking to some youth who have only experienced Trump) many Republicans are still capitalists and free traders who believe in free trade and free markets.
So if you have the filibuster then you can just have the few known for crossing the lines take the fall and defect away from the president while you get to still vote for the tariffs you don't actually like or want and not draw his ire. There are even multiple examples of senators/house representatives doing a similar reverse style strategy that if you already have enough votes to pass then you can be one of the "good ones" and follow the party line even if you don't support it.
There are more opponents of Trump's tariffs than just the people who broke ranks, but just like Rep McClintock they had no reason to take aggro when the votes were already there to win. Reason calls it cowardly, I agree but I think it's a rather reasonable cowardness.
It lets politicians have their cake and eat it too. They don't have to push through things they don't actually agree with while also not having to upset the base (or increasingly the child president) by getting to say "nothing we can do". Signal your loyalty without having to sacrifice your beliefsOnly drawback is that it's harder to do the stuff they do like, but it's a cost they've accepted.
I'm not sure this reasoning works; tariffs were actually in place for more than a year. Are you, hypothetical republican senator that doesn't want tariffs but also doesn't want to offend Trump or his loyalists, satisfied with how things played out? You get to preserve the appearance of loyalty... but you also get tariffs. How would you be worse off if you held your nose and voted for tariffs if you get them either way? Or if tariffs are truly unacceptable to you, wouldn't you want to be able to vote them down?
I can maybe see a way to thread this needle -- the tariffs were eventually struck down, after all... only to be immediately replaced with 'new' tariffs under a different legal theory. Theoretically this one has a time limit, but who at this point believes such technicalities will stop Trump from doing whatever he wants? He'll just come up with some other excuse.
And, actually, this way you get the worst of both worlds; if the tariffs stood, you'd at least get the revenue. This way you get all the economic damage -- the true harm done by tariffs is in the transactions that don't take place, not in the ones that do -- and a $200 billion hole in the budget. And it's not even as though consumers will be made whole. Refunds will go to the people who filed the paperwork, because that's easy, and not to the people who actually bore the incidence of the tax, which has essentially no relation to those accounting details.
I think the actual reason the Senate doesn't want to govern is simpler and more cynical: if voters can't recall a single thing their senator did, they re-elect them. With a baseline 90%+ incumbent re-election rate, there's just nothing to be gained by rocking the boat. (That is, if maintaining their position is the only thing they care about, which is a model I've been given little reason to doubt.)
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