MANCHIN ALMIGHTY

 

Although Donald Trump lost the twenty twenty election, his loss was less than the polls predicted.  And his loss did not hurt down ballot Republicans, who gained seats in the house and did better than expected in the Senate.  In fact, after election day it looked like the Democrats wouldn't take the Senate at all, with two   runoff election victories in Georgia needed.  It seemed like a tall order, but they did it.  While part of that is thanks to the great work that Democratic voting rights activist Stacy Abrams did in that state, another factor was that Trump himself was sending a mixed message to his supporters in Georgia; simultaneously saying that the vote against him there was rigged, but that Republicans should still get out and vote in the runoff.  This confusion did the party no favors in those runoffs, and is a perfect example of the chaos that our former president has unleashed on both the country and his party.

In any event, the Democrats now have both the House of Representatives and the Senate, but the Senate is split down the middle with only Vice President Kamala Harris there to break ties.  One of the fifty Democrats is Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who is probably the most conservative Democrat in the Senate and a thorn in the side of democracy.  It is currently possible for the Senate to get rid of the filibuster rule that mandates sixty votes for any bill to get passed, and allow bills to pass with a simple majority, but only if all Democrats vote to remove it.  And Manchin wants to keep it.  At one point he did consider making filibusters more difficult by supporting a talking filibuster (currently all a Senator has to do is announce they want to use it), but recently he wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post stating  there is“no circumstance in which I will vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster.”  To be fair to Manchin, I understand that he is a tough position, somehow he has remained in office for over ten years as a Democrat in a very red state that Trump won with almost seventy percent of the vote in the last election.  And his desire for bipartisanship sounds niee on the surface.  But the modern Republican party is not one for compromise as we saw so clearly during the Barack Obama years.   Under  Obama, the Republican's use of the filibuster skyrocketed.  The Republican Senators tried to put a hold on his judicial appointments and successfully blocked  one of his Supreme Court nominees from even getting a hearing in the Senate ten months before the twenty sixteen election.  Years later the same Republicans  shoved  Trump's nominee Amy Coney Barrett  onto the court just a month before the  twenty twenty election. And there are still Republican members of congress who won't publicly  admit that Joe Biden won the election legitimately.  Do you really think that they want to work with him?  There may be a rebel or two (Mitt Romney?) but  ten Republican Senators  will be needed to override a filibuster, and that will never happen to any significant bill pushed by the Democrats.

Really, Manchin's editorial couldn't have come at a worse time for the Democrats.   In the wake of their twenty twenty loss, the Republican party has decided to double down on voter suppression, targeted at African American voters.  Although they claim that this is because so many Americans are "concerned" about voter fraud after the twenty twenty election,  they don't mention that that concern comes from Donald Trump continually lying about his loss.  A more honest reason for these laws was given by Michael A. Carvin arguing in the Supreme Court on March second when he defended a voter restriction law in Arizona by stating  that overturning the law “puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats." Republican legislators in Iowa and Georgia have already passed such laws, with Texas, Arizona and Florida ready to join in.  In response, a bill that expands the right to vote on a national level has been written by Democrats in the Senate.  It's a sweeping endorsement of the right to vote, and, as it now stands, it has virtually no chance of passing.  There is no way that any Republican would support such a bill, and with the filibuster in place, no way that it can get past the Senate.

Putting it simply, Manchin's support of the outdated filibuster rule will allow Republicans to pass restrictive voting laws to help them retake congress in twenty twenty two and freeze the Biden administration from doing anything legislatively.  You would think that, as a Democrat, Manchin would care about that, even if he himself is not up for reelection until twenty twenty four.  Instead he clings to this notion of bipartisanship that just doesn't exist anymore.  The Republican Party is still lead by an unpopular, one term president who cost his party the White House and both branches of Congress, and is made up of people who think that Biden only won because the election was rigged, when they aren't following Qanon.   The days of Republican compromise, and really, sanity, are mostly gone.