Tag Archives: Joe Manchin

Never Trust a Politician Who Loves Coal and Drives a Maserati

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The moderate Republican senator from West Virginia who calls himself a “Democrat” says he cannot vote for the Build Back Better Act for a few silly reasons he borrowed from the 50 immoderate senators who openly admit they’re Republicans. This was after months of negotiations. The White House is royally pissed. Press Secretary Jen Psaki issued this statement soon after Manchin spoke on the Republican news channel:

Senator Manchin’s comments this morning on FOX are at odds with his discussions this week with the President, with White House staff, and with his own public utterances. Weeks ago, Senator Manchin committed to the President, at his home in Wilmington, to support the Build Back Better framework that the President then subsequently announced. Senator Manchin pledged repeatedly to negotiate on finalizing that framework “in good faith.”

On Tuesday of this week, Senator Manchin came to the White House and submitted—to the President, in person, directly—a written outline for a Build Back Better bill that was the same size and scope as the President’s framework, and covered many of the same priorities. While that framework was missing key priorities [especially climate-related, I bet], we believed it could lead to a compromise acceptable to all. Senator Manchin promised to continue conversations in the days ahead, and to work with us to reach that common ground. If his comments on FOX and written statement indicate an end to that effort, they represent a sudden and inexplicable reversal in his position, and a breach of his commitments to the President and the Senator’s colleagues in the House and Senate.

Senator Manchin claims that this change of position is related to inflation, but the think tank he often cites on Build Back Better—the Penn Wharton Budget Institute—issued a report less than 48 hours ago that noted the Build Back Better Act will have virtually no impact on inflation in the short term, and, in the long run, the policies it includes will ease inflationary pressures. Many leading economists with whom Senator Manchin frequently consults also support Build Back Better.

Build Back Better lowers costs that families pay. It will reduce what families pay for child care. It will reduce what they pay for prescription drugs. It will lower health care premiums. And it puts a tax cut in the pockets of families with kids. If someone is concerned about the impact that higher prices are having on families, this bill gives them a break. [He also referred to the deficit and energy policy.]

. . . Just as Senator Manchin reversed his position on Build Back Better this morning, we will continue to press him to see if he will reverse his position yet again, to honor his prior commitments and be true to his word.

In the meantime, Senator Manchin will have to explain to those families paying $1,000 a month for insulin why they need to keep paying that, instead of $35 for that vital medicine. He will have to explain to the nearly two million women who would get the affordable day care they need to return to work why he opposes a plan to get them the help they need. Maybe Senator Manchin can explain to the millions of children who have been lifted out of poverty, in part due to the Child Tax Credit, why he wants to end a program that is helping achieve this milestone—we cannot.

We are proud of what we have gotten done in 2021: the American Rescue Plan, the fastest decrease in unemployment in U.S. history, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, over 200 million Americans vaccinated, schools reopened, the fastest rollout of vaccines to children anywhere in the world, and historic appointments to the Federal judiciary.

But we will not relent in the fight to help Americans with their child care, health care, prescription drug costs, and elder care—and to combat climate change. The fight for Build Back Better is too important to give up. We will find a way to move forward next year.

Unquote.

I was wrong to think the Democrats would pass Build Back Better in some form this month. I still think they’ll get some of it done in the new year, since even Manchin will vote for some of it. The state he represents prefers Republicans but has the lowest per capita income in America, lower even than Mississippi. Politicians usually want to help people who live in their states, even if said politicians made their money in the coal industry and drive a Maserati.

Manchin, Manchin, Manchin, Maybe, Maybe, Maybe

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Since all 50 Republican senators are opposed to even debating voting rights legislation, the only way for the current Senate to protect democracy is for all 50 Democrats to agree to change the filibuster. One “Democrat” who hasn’t agreed yet is the Maserati-driving, coal-loving senator from West Virginia. Greg Sargent of The Washington Post says there might still be a glimmer of hope regarding Sen. Manchin and voting rights:

By now, you’d be forgiven for concluding the chances of Sen. Joe Manchin III supporting a filibuster carve-out to pass democracy protections are somewhere between nonexistent and extremely nonexistent.

The West Virginia Democrat has spent many months chasing after Republican support for legislation protecting voting rights and democracy, and virtually none has materialized. Yet he continues to insist he won’t support any sort of filibuster reform, even to pass legislation he himself champions that would accomplish something he himself says is essential [it’s not clear he knows the meaning of “essential”].

But in an interesting twist, some Senate Democrats still haven’t given up on Manchin. Though the story all over Twitter is that Waiting For Manchin is utterly hopeless, they’re still trying to win him over.

I’m told Manchin and a dozen other Senate Democrats met with an expert on Senate rules and discussed various ways of carving out a filibuster exception or otherwise reforming it to allow passage of voting rights legislation. . . . 

The ideas included looking at how to change the rules specifically to pass voting rights protections by a simple majority threshold, a Senate Democratic source who shared details of the meeting told me. The source added: “Manchin is engaged.”

The expert whom Manchin and other Democrats met with is Martin Paone, who has three decades of experience in Senate staff positions, the source tells me. Paone will also attend Friday’s caucus meeting among Senate Democrats, where this will get further discussion.

These meetings are separate from another set of meetings going on among Senate Democrats that doesn’t involve Manchin.

Manchin supports a reasonably good package of democracy protections, including things such as automatic voting registration, various curbs on voter suppression and election subversion, limits on partisan gerrymandering, and baseline standards to facilitate voting by mail. Elections expert Richard L. Hasen has declared a package like this worth supporting.

The dynamics on Manchin and the filibuster are more complicated than it seems from the outside. According to a voting rights advocate who has been in discussions with Manchin and other Democratic senators, the basic contours of the situation are as follows.

First, Manchin remains reluctant to support anything seen as a “slippery slope” to ending the filibuster entirely. So it’s more likely he’d support reforms that stop short of a full carve-out of the filibuster to pass voting legislation. Such reforms could include requiring the minority to hold the floor to sustain a filibuster . . . 

The advocate says Manchin is more open to ideas [that] can legitimately be described as “restoring the filibuster” [to what it used to be, i.e. a way to delay a vote, not block it].

This would be a good argument. After all, a filibuster can now be executed simply via an emailed statement from a single senator. That’s obviously a ridiculous state of affairs that allows the minority to render the Senate dysfunctional for bad-faith purposes while escaping procedural difficulties in doing so, and even evading public accountability for it.

Still, . . .  pulling the trigger on broad reforms [that would increase] the burden on the minority is complicated. Manchin could decide a carve-out just on voting rights is simpler in the interim, the advocate says.

Here’s another nuance. A second source who has been informed about discussions between Manchin and other senators tells me Manchin seems open to arguments that cast filibuster reform as a response to partisan procedural abuses.

In this conception of the situation, that source says, the fact that the Senate can’t pass voting rights legislation “shows that the institution is fundamentally failing,” precisely because it “used to do so on a broad bipartisan basis.”

What’s more, this source says, this sort of filibuster reform wouldn’t be about “passing the left’s priorities,” but instead about “passing changes that are basic to the functioning of democracy.”

Manchin appears open to these arguments as a longtime advocate for bipartisanship in the Senate, the source says, because here it’s obvious the filibuster is being used to further partisan efforts to close down pro-democracy reforms that used to be a bipartisan no-brainer.

And of course, this really is the essence of the matter. Manchin really has spent months in a good-faith effort to win over GOP support for democracy protections that he really does believe are essential to making the system function better.

The only [Republican] senator who has appeared marginally interested in participating is Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. The fact that virtually the entire GOP is uninterested — while GOP state legislatures are passing restrictions on voting everywhere by simple majority — should have weight for Manchin.

Because after all, if democracy reform must be bipartisan, as Manchin says — yet virtually no Republicans will participate, no matter how earnestly Manchin seeks their support — then sticking to that notion is tantamount to allowing Republicans to single-handedly remove democracy reform from the agenda entirely, on a purely partisan basis.

That can’t be acceptable, by Manchin’s own lights.

To be clear, there are still reasons for extreme skepticism that Manchin will ever get to yes. But if he somehow does, these routes might be the way he gets there.

Midnight Is Approaching: We Can Have Either the Filibuster or Democracy

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Last month, Republican senators refused to allow a vote on the Freedom To Vote Act. Because of the Senate’s filibuster rule, the fifty Democratic senators needed ten of their Republican colleagues to join them in allowing the bill to come up for a vote. But not one Republican voted with the Democrats (the Democratic majority leader changed his vote to No so the bill can be given another chance). Here’s why Republicans oppose the bill. The Freedom To Vote Act would:

  • Expand voter registration (e.g., automatic and same-day registration) and voting access (e.g., vote-by-mail and early voting) and limit removing voters from voter rolls.
  • Establish Election Day as a federal holiday.
  • Allow ex-felons to vote. 
  • Make it illegal to interfere with another person’s ability to register and vote.
  • Require states to follow new rules for post-election audits and congressional redistricting.
  • Expand the prohibition on campaign spending by foreign nationals and require additional disclosure of campaign-related fundraising and spending.

No wonder every single Republican senator refused to allow the bill to be considered. They’re opposed to the idea of majority rule.

In support of the bill’s passage, however, more than 150 academics, experts in subjects like political science, history and public policy, have released this statement:

We, the undersigned, are scholars of democracy writing in support of the Freedom to Vote Act, the most important piece of legislation to defend and strengthen American democracy since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This bill would protect our elections from interference, partisan gerrymandering, dark money, and voter suppression. We urge all members of Congress to pass the bill, if necessary by suspending the Senate filibuster rule and using a simple majority vote.

This is no ordinary moment in the course of our democracy. It is a moment of great peril and risk.

Though disputes over the legitimacy of America’s elections have been growing for two decades, they have taken a catastrophic turn since the 2020 election. The “Big Lie” of a stolen election is now widely accepted among Republican voters, and support for it has become a litmus test for Republicans running for public office. Republican state legislatures in Georgia, Florida, Texas, and across the country have enacted partisan laws intended to make it harder for Democrats to win elections. Most alarmingly, these laws have forged legal pathways for partisan politicians to overturn state election results if they are dissatisfied with the outcome.

The partisan politicization of what has long been trustworthy, non-partisan administration of elections represents a clear and present threat to the future of electoral democracy in the United States. The history of other crisis-ridden democracies tells us this threat cannot be wished away. It must be promptly and forthrightly confronted. Failure to pass the Freedom to Vote Act would heighten post-election disputes, weaken government legitimacy, and damage America’s international reputation as a beacon of democracy in the world.

Each branch of government has a role to play in protecting free and fair elections, but Congress’s responsibility looms largest. After the Civil War, when the path of American democracy was highly uncertain, Congress built the foundations of our modern democracy by passing two constitutional amendments and five pieces of legislation to protect the right of African Americans to vote. All were passed on party-line votes. But in 1890, the Senate failed to break a filibuster on a sixth piece of legislation: the Federal Elections Bill (also known as the Lodge Bill), which would have pushed back against voting rights violations in the South.

The upshot of that critical vote was that southern states, in the absence of any federal supervision, were allowed to pursue the wholesale disenfranchisement of African Americans for the next 75 years. By a tiny margin in one branch of Congress, American democracy took a giant leap backwards.

Protecting future elections from subversion, providing equal opportunities for all citizens to participate, drawing fair district boundaries, strengthening transparency over money in politics, and facilitating impartial electoral administration should not be partisan matters. Unfortunately, however, across state legislatures, Republicans have challenged the legitimacy of the 2020 U.S. presidential election and altered election rules on party-line votes, with a clear intent to entrench minority rule.

If Congress fails to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, American democracy will be at critical risk. Not only could this failure undermine the minimum condition for electoral democracy—free and fair elections—but it would in turn likely result in an extended period of minority rule, which a majority of the country would reject as undemocratic and illegitimate. This would have grave consequences not only for our democracy, but for political order, economic prosperity, and the national security of the United States as well.

Defenders of democracy in America still have a slim window of opportunity to act. But time is ticking away, and midnight is approaching. To lose our democracy but preserve the filibuster in its current form—in which a minority can block popular legislation without even having to hold the floor—would be a short-sighted mistake of historic proportions. The remarkable history of the American system of government is replete with critical, generational moments in which liberal democracy itself was under threat, and Congress asserted its central leadership role in proving that a system of free and fair elections can work.

We urge the Senate to suspend the filibuster rule for this measure and pass the Freedom to Vote Act. This would uphold the Senate’s noblest tradition of preserving and strengthening American democracy.

Unquote.

At least two Democratic senators, Sinema of Arizona and Manchin of West Virginia, have opposed reforming the filibuster in order to protect voting rights. Tom Tomorrow of This Modern World nicely captures the “logic” of their position:

TMW2021-11-24color

If you’d like to share your views on this matter (in a nice way) with Senator Sinema, you can contact her even if you don’t live in Arizona. Likewise, you can contact Senator Manchin even if you don’t live in West Virginia. Maybe they care enough about democracy to see reason.