Prime Minister Joe Manchin declared in a new published op-ed that he supports segregation and opposes democracy: Why I'm voting against the For the People ActCharleston [WV] Gazette-Mail 06/06/2021. The For The People Act, also known as H.R.1, is the main piece of legislation passed by the House and now pending in the Senate, which would give the federal government the authorization to reverse many of the segregationist voter-suppression laws Republicans are continuing to pass across the country.
His "argument" is that the Republican are passing blatantly partisan voter-suppression laws, so any federal law to prevent that should also be supported by the Republicans whose party is so completely committed to voter suppression. No, it's not an actual argument. It doesn't even rise to the level of gaslighting. It just means that PM Manchin supports the Republicans' segregationist voter-suppression laws.
And, to re-emphasize his commitment to the Democratic Party of Theodore Bilbo and Ross Barnett, he writes, "I will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster."
That also means that his claim that he will support the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, a bill designed to remove the objections that the Supreme Court used to gut the 1965 Voting Rights Act, is effectively meaningless. Unless the filibuster is adjusted or abolish, the Senate Republicans will just kill it with the filibuster.
A nominal Democrat, PM Manchin is all on board with the Republican program to "Orbanize" the US by extreme gerrymandering like that in Viktor Orbán's Hungary to insure the Republicans always win a majority of seats even when Democrats win a majority of votes, by suppressing African-American and Latino votes and restricting voter access for poor whites, and by setting aside the rule of law, at least when it comes to members of the Republican Party or the oligarchs who support them.
I'm going to start using the word "segregation" a lot more for our current political situation. The core of Southern segregation was the disenfranchisement of African-Americans in defiance of the 13th and 14 Amendments to the Constitution.
The segregated schools and the endless number of official restrictions designed to restrict and demean black citizens are probably what comes to mind for most people when the word "segrgation" is mentioned. But the foundation, the core of the segregation system was the suppression of the rights of African-American voters. It was dominant in the South for at least 80 years, depending on what post 1875 date your pick as the end of Reconstruction.
TYT's Cenk Uygur expressed his disgust at PM Orbán-Manchin on Twitter:
Joe Biden’s first term is now over with Manchin saying he’s against both filibuster reform & For the People Act. Biden doesn’t have the inclination to fight back. They’ll get almost nothing done from now on. Manchin just handed Congress back to @GOP. He’s worse than a Republican.
Josh Marshall takes a swipe at what is going on with the Biden-Harris Administration's legislative strategy to overcome Republican obstruction on major bills. That's assuming they actually have a coherent strategy. (We Must Sail, Not Drift: The White House is Adrift and on a Path to DefeatTPM 06/04/2021)
The bottom line in his analysis:
If you’re likely to lose it is better to structure the engagement on your own terms than to drift and await the action or inaction of others. This is true both as a dignified and ethical approach to life and as the best course to achieve a positive result. Biden will have to start placing some limits on the course of events. I don’t think he can allow Joe Manchin to decide when the negotiations have run long enough, which seems to be the case now. I think he’ll have to move on to passing his own bill. Then Manchin will have to decide whether he votes for or against it. It’s entirely possible he’ll do the latter. But then we will at least know where everyone stands. And that’s a better way to go down to defeat than path we’re currently on. ...
Taking charge of the situation doesn’t ensure victory. But it’s a better shot at it than the current drift. And in any case, it’s better to lose on your own terms than the current death of a thousand cuts. [my emphasis]
Josh's analysis looks at some of the negotiating dynamics involving Prime Minister Joe Manchin. Including the fact that he himself isn't obviously using his own leverage in the negotiations to pressure Republicans to come closer to Democratic proposals.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has announced that he will bring several major pieces of legislation "to the floor" in June, including the US Innovation and Competition Act, Paycheck Fairness Act (fair wages for women), gun safety legislation (maybe), and the particularly urgently needed "For The People" voting-rights bill, That means that to block them with the filibuster, the Republicans will have to show up in person to vote on the filibuster, as opposed to the current system where they can support a filibuster by a phone call or an email.
Legislative battles and the accompanying parliamentary procedural fog can obscure the significance of the actual votes being taken. In recent decades, the Republicans with their very aggressive legislative obstructionism against Democratic President from Clinton to Obama to Biden have shown themselves to be considerably more skilled at framing the public meaning of those fights than the Democrats have been.
And I take that to be the main point of that column. The Administration and the Senate Democrats need a well-thought-out political strategy to maximize the political cost to the Republicans of voting against popular legislation. They also have to hammer home a consistent message to voters that the Republicans blocked this legislation and that is bad for you.
It can hardly be said enough that the For The People voting-rights legislation is urgent to block and reverse the segregationist voter-suppression laws Republicans are furiously pushing across the country.
The TPM TV podcast for 06/04/2021 covers the filibuster problems and other issues, Ep. 175: Two Tracks:
I was pleasantly surprised to see President Biden come out explicitly for going back to the "talking filibuster," which as Richardson explains requires Senators to hold the floor by having someone speaking continually, the classic way the filibuster was used in most of the 20th century. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) has a report on the Filibuster and "cloture" rule by which the Senate can end debate and forced a vote on the measure at hand, Filibusters and Cloture in the Senate 04/07/2017.
This Reuters article (Susan Cornwell, What is the U.S. Senate filibuster and why is everyone talking about it? 03/17/2021) explains an important aspect of the current conflict over the filibuster. The current filibuster rule allows a Senator to hold up a bill without having to have someone continually talk on the Senate floor.
In 1975, the Senate reduced the requirement for limiting debate to three-fifths of the Senate - currently 60 senators.
In that decade, the Senate leadership began agreeing to allow measures that were facing a filibuster to be put aside while the chamber acted on other bills.
The move was intended to prevent opposition to a single bill bringing all work in the Senate to halt, but it also meant that the filibuster changed from an energy-draining maneuver involving lengthy speeches to a mere objection, or threat to object.
Over time the number of filibusters skyrocketed. There is no sure-fire way of counting how many bills are filibustered in a year because of the nebulous nature of the threats. But a count of votes to try to overcome a filibuster, the nearest reliable proxy, shows 298 such votes in the 2019-2020 legislative session. That’s up from 168 such votes in the previous two years. In 1969-1970 there were six.
Putting filibustered bills aside “made filibustering actually more successful, and even less costly, which was not intended. And it might have, paradoxically, made things worse,” said Sarah Binder, a political science professor at George Washington University who co-wrote a book on the filibuster. [my emphasis]
Under the current rules, one Senator can "filibuster" by raising an objection to a bill being voted on - it's called putting a "hold" on a bill - and it requires a (filibuster-ending) cloture to end it. In practice, that creates a de facto supermajority requirement of 60 votes to pass a bill in the Senate.
The filibuster has been already been abolished altogether for consideration of judicial nominations. And the "reconciliation" procedure that was used to pass the COVID relief bill recently is also a way around the filibuster, though it is restricted to matters that have a significant budget impact.
Returning to the "talking filibuster" concept would definitely be a big improvement over the current situation. However, the filibuster was often used successfully in the 20th century to block civil rights legislation like federal anti-lynching laws. The Senate is already by its composition with two Senators for each state, so that Utah with its 253 thousand inhabitants has the same Senate representation as California with its 40 million. That would be reason enough to abolish the filibuster altogether, which can be done by majority vote in the Senate.
Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein in their 2012 book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, explained how the Republicans changed the function of the filibuster qualitativly and for the worse after Obama became President in 2009:
[A]ttempts at filibuster and formal responses to them-meaning actual cloture motions to shut off debate-remained relatively rare, even during the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. The number of cloture motions did increase after that, mostly because a handful of individual conservative senators, especially Democrat James Allen of Alabama and Republican Jesse Helms of North Carolina, seeing the role of Southern conservatives as a bloc decline, began to use more creative ways to gain leverage. This included finding ways to extend debate after a filibuster was invoked by offering hundreds of amendments and insisting on a vote on each. Still, even with Allen remaining active until his death in 1978, the average number of cloture motions filed in a given month was less than two; it increased to around three a month in the 1980s, jumped a bit in the 1990s during the Clinton presidency, and then leveled off in the early Bush years. But starting in 2006, this number spiked dramatically and even more with the election of Barack Obama. In the 110th Congress, 2007-2008, and in the 111th Congress, the number of cloture motions filed when the Senate was in session was on the order of two a week! [my emphasis]
(For philosophy fans, that could be used as an example of Hegel's notion of quantity turning into quality.)
As Digby observes in her post, "let's not kid ourselves. Those norms [of government institutions including the Senate] had always only been as strong as the people who were charged with upholding them and those agreements were unraveling long before Trump entered politics."
Mann and Ornstein give a quick overview of how the radicalization of the Republican Party continued until Trump became President in How the Republicans Broke CongressNew York Times 12/02/2017.
And the radicalization continues, even after the January 6 Capitol insurrection. As they famously put it in their 2012 book:
[H]owever awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier - ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the center of American politics, it is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country's most pressing challenges. [my emphasis]
The COVID relief bill really is an important, beneficial piece of legislation. It's been passed by the House and the Senate and blessed by President Joe Manchin, so now it goes to reconciliation and presumably will soon become law.
Paul Krugman talks about the very good economics of the relief bill: "while the American Rescue Plan is mainly disaster relief rather than conventional stimulus, it’s a big proposal that will, in fact, provide a lot of economic stimulus." (The macro equivalent of war?Substack 02/27/2021) Obviously, we won' know the final form of the bill until it actually passes.
But the COVID relief plan is a very good contrast to Obama's initial stimulus package in 2009, which economists like Krugman were frantically warning was only about half the size it needed to be. Then Obama negotiated with Republicans and agreed to put more of it into less-stimulative tax cuts. Then the Republicans voted against it anyway. Biden at least seems to have really learned from that experience about how to deal with bad-faith Republican negotiators.
And Biden didn't spend the transition period promoting a Grand Bargain where the Republicans would agree to raise taxes and the Democrats would agree to cut Social Security and Medicare like Obama did in 2008-9. And so far, we haven't heard any talk from this administration about a new Boles-Simpson Let Grandma-Eat-Catfood Commission, which was nothing but a huge political gift to the Republicans going into the 2010 midterms.
By the way, Biden campaigned in 2020 on lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 60, the opposite of what Obama's fortunately stillborn Grand Bargain would have done.
Krugman also wants to see a good Keynesian pedal-to-the-metal approach on the infrastructure/climate crisis program. (How (not) to pay for building back better 03/07/2021)
The Republicans are currently so full-in on culture themes, like defending the nobility of, uh, Neanderthals (?!?), that they mostly haven't been using their normal "Debt! Deficit! Aaaaa--iiieeee! economic arguments very much so far. But Krugman is offering preemptive refutations, anyway.
But he also warns about the weakness of the Democratic performance on the issue:
Yes, there were moments when the Democrats — still no more of an “organized political party” than when Will Rogers told that joke a century ago — looked determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, confronted with a bill that, with the arguable exception of Obamacare in 2010, does more for the U.S. middle class than any legislation since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society since the mid-1960s. The macho posturing of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin — for whom getting on the Sunday talk shows matters more than his state’s high rate of poverty — nearly toppled the bill, and the Democrats’ blind spot on the $15 minimum wage is deeply disappointing to leftists who voted for Biden last November.
Still, he's optimistic about the implications of the trend of the Democrats' current performance, including the narrow Senate victory on the COVID relief bill:
But in the end, the Democrats’ resolve and unity among its one-vote Senate majority was a stunning victory for a new American political reality in the 2020s. It involves forging an all-new definition of “bipartisanship” around hardball politics for measures that are supported by majorities of citizens, rather than negotiating with a Republican Party that continues to rally behind a Big Lie around nonexistent voter fraud and the 2020 election that threatens our democracy.
Bunch also points out that without Democrats in the Senate being willing to at least partially set aside the filibuster rule, an urgently needed voting rights bill to counter the current nationwide Republican drive to restrict minority voting. "If Republicans win in the 2022 midterms not by the power of their ideas but by picking who gets to cast a vote, the rest of the Biden/Democratic agenda will be dead, and that won’t be the worst of it for the American Experiment." (Why Biden needs a prime-time, Oval Office speech to declare war on voter suppressionPhiladelphia Inquirer 03/08/2021)
Getting this passed means that Harris and all 50 Senate Dems have to somehow set aside the filibuster for the new voting rights bill. Every vote in the Senate to keep the filibuster in force on this bill is a vote for Republican white-supremacist voter suppression. And all the Senators, even the most dimwitted ones like Ron Johnson and Ted Cruz, are very clear about that.
If President Joe Manchin or other ConsevervaDems succeed in killing the voting rights bill by voting to keep the filibuster applying to that bill, they will be doing enormous damage not only to the Democratic Party but to the democratic system itself.
The press loves to focus on who is in which high school clique ...
My terrible, trolly opinion that I'm only sharing because I want to piss off Twitter is that, if a senator from a state that Trump won by 40 points votes yes on a bill that does 90 percent of what you hoped it would do, that senator is not your enemy and is, in fact, your friend.
But getting that voting rights bill passed is critical, no matter how much it gives the pundits a Big Sad to see ConservaDems like President Manchin be called on the carpet over it.
