Imagine you’re a U.S. Senator who wants to pass some legislation to protect voting rights and reform the American electoral system. Almost by definition, this means you’re a Democrat, and in 2021 you’re never going to find the ten Republicans you need to overcome a filibuster. It looks like you’re fucked, but you’d like to at least make everyone take a vote just to have some accountability and show your constituents that you tried.
Now you discover you have another problem. You only have 50 members of your caucus and you need all of your colleagues to vote with you or you’ll wind up looking like an idiot for bringing up a bill only to see a majority oppose it. That means you have to please Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and he won’t even go along with a strong messaging bill. Even though there’s no threat it will ever become a law, he’s going to water it down as a condition of his meaningless support. Yeah, this is frustrating, but it’s the price you gotta pay, so you start negotiating and then act like it’s some big accomplishment when you’re close to working out a deal.
Senate Democrats are close to an agreement on updated voting rights legislation that can get the support of all 50 Democratic-voting senators, three Democratic aides familiar with negotiations said…
…The member-level discussions are complete, a source said, but staff members are going through the text to fix technical issues. No further details have been shared.
It’s very important that you fix all the technical issues for this law that will never overcome a filibuster.
The legislation would require the votes of 60 senators, including 10 Republicans, and it’s unlikely that Democrats will get enough Republican supporters.
Fortunately, Manchin will be on board with your message that this is important legislation, and he will repeatedly argue that 10 Republican senators might still be convinced to support it, even though that’s utterly preposterous as everyone knows. When it doesn’t happen, because it won’t, Manchin will say it’s a great shame and further evidence that we need less partisanship in Washington DC.
Fortunately, the Democrats will be able to truthfully say that the watered down bill would have passed if not for Republican obstruction. Go team.
You can call this making lemonade out of lemons, or the best of a bad situation, but that doesn’t make it honest. People are going to call bullshit on the whole charade even though a good charade was the best you could manage under the circumstances.
For my money, the voting legislation is very urgent, but it’s still not as urgent as Biden passing his first-year investment agenda through Congress. We can humor Manchin on the voting stuff because we’re both going to lose anyway, but we can actually win on the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and Build Back Better Act (BBBA) if Manchin will give us his vote. If he can’t be convinced, then Biden is screwed, the Democrats are screwed, the country is screwed, and frankly the planet is screwed, so it’s probably not a good idea to let your frustration with Manchin get so heated that you start attacking his personal integrity and his daughter.
Look, if you’re writing a straight reporting piece on Manchin’s role in all of this, it’s important to mention the good and the bad, and that means you have to talk about how he made his money and the corruption of his daughter. But if the reason you’re writing about the IIJA and BBBA is because you want one or both to pass, then why are you going out of your way to anger the man who holds your fate in his hands?
If I were the Republicans, I’d pay progressives to write these pieces.
I hate that we’re in this situation, but I’m not fond of ignoring situations when I’m trying to navigate through them. I’m not in politics because I like the sound of my own voice.
The whole game here is not just getting Manchin to ‘yes’ but getting him to as much ‘yes’ as possible. Is he insufferable? Of course he is. It’s partly by design.
In 2016, Trump carried West Virginia by over 300,000 votes. Two years later, Manchin won reelection by 19,000 votes. That’s a minor miracle, made only more clear by the fact that Trump carried West Virginia in 2020 by 300,010 votes. Have you ever tried to convince three hundred thousand Trump voters to pull the lever for a friend of Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi?
Well, Manchin hasn’t only asked, he’s actually convinced them. If he hadn’t, we’d still have Mitch McConnell running the Senate.
Do you think there are hundreds of thousands of Trump voters in the whole country who want to make it easier for people to vote early or absentee? Do you think Trump voters want Biden to pass his whole multi-trillion dollar agenda? Think of what you’re asking Manchin to do, and then maybe you’ll understand better why a few charades are necessary. But play-acting only works if you understand that it’s not real. Attacking the man’s daughter is real, and it’s not helpful. Stop it.
I am depressed and you are not helping. I feel like the American experiment or whatever you want to call it is in serious trouble. Just at the moment there seems no way to pass the most important of the two bills, so we will have to settle for the trillion dollar bi partisan infrastructure plan, better than nothing I suppose. And who knows what next election holds– but I would bet on Trump at the moment. And that is all we get unless Manchin gets religion and little chance of that. Meanwhile Biden ended the elite’s last hoorah at empire building hoping to stop the bleeding through endless wars and tax cutting since 9/11 and just maybe redirect some money to fight, well shit, pick one covd, mother nature, China, Russia or cyberwarfare, they are all at the door.
I don’t know where Manchin will wind up but I know he doesn’t want to destroy Joe Biden. He may do it anyway. He may leave the party entirely. But if so it will only be because Biden’s “allies” pissed him off so much that he can’t see straight.
Who knows what Manchin’s bottom line is…or if he has one. But progressives would do well to remember Manchin’s tactics on the American Rescue Plan: he made a big stink about how the Senate wasn’t going to rubberstamp the House bill, then he claimed the $1.9 trillion House bill was too large and vowed never to vote for it, then he picked a couple of policies in the bill (like extended UI benefits) and made a lot of noise about cutting them (which he did, slightly), then…he voted for the $1.85 trillion bill AND immediately went on every available television network (very much including Fox News) to claim credit for negotiating a centrist bill that everyone could be proud of.
Even if you don’t like the script, you have to admire the performance. Manchin has made himself the living embodiment of “centrism” and “moderation”…so much so that if and when he votes for a bill that makes it *by definition* a centrist bill. That’s how you win as a Democrat in a state that’s +40 for Trump.
Thank you for that recent history lesson. I know McConnell has made noises about Manchin being unreliable to the point of worthlessness to the Republican cause. I hope to God he’s mostly posturing. In the past, he’s spoken about the possibility of tightening up the filibuster in ways that would make it harder to maintain. I still have hope for the budget and for filibuster reform but perhaps I’m naive on the latter. He’s also made loud noises about opposing any changes whatsoever. Time will tell.
Manchin isn’t going to win re-election, so if he’s convinced that he has a chance then the bill is going to be terrible to the point that it’s possible we’d be better off killing it altogether. Devil will be in the details. He might ask for a negligible pound of flesh. It might be a terrible ask that it’s better to kill it all. This isn’t like with the ACA where the moderates had all of the leverage.
Thanks for your response. What’s “terrible to the point…we’d be better off killing it altogether”? For example, what if Manchin would go for a $2.5 trillion bill instead of a $3.5 trillion bill?
If he insists on work requirements for the child tax credit I think it would be a good line in the sand to say no. He can means test them more if he wants, but that is a very hard redline and shouldn’t be crossed. If he wants to kill the entire bill over it — including the bipartisan BIB — that is his choice.
So in other words, I’m less concerned about toplines than structure. If it’s 3.5 trillions for a lot of programs done poorly versus 2.5 trillion for doing two programs very well, the lower topline might even be better.
Thank you for writing this. Progressives seem at times to have a disconnect between performance and consequence, preferring not to focus on the latter. Politics is about power. Without power we accomplish nothing. It is infinitely better to have a narrow, cramped, backward Democrat like Joe Manchin, than to have the Republican who’d replace him. To date I’ve seen no progressive elected in a district without at least a D+10 lean. They are not broadly popular.
Next cycle maybe we don’t come up with cute memes like Defund or ACAB or talk about replacing capitalism with socialism even as the European socialist parties are circling the drain.
The strength of Democrats is in optimism and hope, not heaping Twitter scorn on anyone to the right of AOC. We must not become the gloomy, humorless, pessimistic party. People want hope.
yawn.
I agree… and disagree.
Your logic is sound. The problem is that more than a few people are noticing we may be coming to an endgame for this republic. Joe’s reelection plans dont seem all that important once we reach the top of that slide.
So I dont blame them. They see what I am seeing and kindly want him to cut the act.
It’s going to be awesome when Republicans in varius states throw out thousands of votes in front of everyone’s faces, tilting elections all over the country. Then the Supreme Court will tell the federal Government to shut up and take it.
What will the Government do? I’ll probably just turn the channel. A game will be on. Won’t want to miss that…
Marc Elias says the Democrats came up with a good voting bill. I predict zero Republican votes to allow a vote on it.