Prime Minister Joe Manchin goes full segregationist

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 Act Charleston [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.

Reuters reports on the latest from PM Orbán-Manchin, Manchin to oppose voting rights bill pushed by Democrats 06/07/2021:

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.

— Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) June 6, 2021

Here is Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison responding to PM Orbán-Manchin's latest reaffirmation of his support of segregation and his hostility to democracy, DNC Chair With Direct Response to Sen. Joe Manchin Bill Decision 06/6/2021:

The filibuster, the Biden-Harris Administration, and using losses to win

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 Defeat TPM 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:

COVID relief bill and the state of Democratic reform prospects

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.

Will Bunch points out that the Republicans in solidly opposing a minimum wage increase handed the Democrats what should be a potent issue to use against them. (How the GOP blew its chance at a 2022 working-class coalition in just 10 hours, 43 minutes Philadelphia Inquirer 03/08/2021)

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 suppression Philadelphia 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.

— Ian Millhiser (@imillhiser) March 7, 2021

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.

Asymmetric partisan polarization and the Senate filibuster

Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) explains his view on Why partisanship will increase in the post-Trump era MarketWatch 01/04/2021.

He stresses an extremely important lesson about the experience of the Obama-Biden Administration on fiscal policy that Biden-Harris need to apply immediately after they take office:

First and foremost, there is fiscal policy: the federal government’s use of spending and taxation, in this case to facilitate an economic recovery. The Republicans will try to block most helpful spending as much as possible, perhaps most important as a fundamental part of their political strategy.

They learned something from the Great Recession of 2008-09. They fought and reduced Democratic stimulus plans—which were not big enough to begin with—as much as possible. The end result was unemployment in October 2010 was still at 9.4%; and millions more jobs were lacking if we look at the decline in employment since the recession, rather than the unemployment stats only.

This was a resounding success, from their point of view. In the November 2010 elections, Republicans picked up 63 seats in the House, flipping control of the chamber, and gained six seats in the Senate.

The Biden-Harris Administration faces both the need to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic itself and with the recession that coincided with it, which officially began in February 2020.

So far, there seems to be no looming financial crisis on the horizon. And Paul Krugman still seems to be expecting something like a V-shaped (i.e., rapid) recovery once the COVID vaccine can achieve herd immunity. But the vaccination rollout is starting very slowly in the US. And it's clear that the Trump-Pence Administration had no vaccine distribution plan worth the name. So even if we get a V-shaped recovery, it's not likely to take obvious effect until sometime in 2022.

As Weisbrot writs:

Much more spending will be necessary just to pull the economy back to the levels of employment and unemployment that we had before the COVID recession, and to help the millions who have been hurt by the pandemic. We still don’t even know how much worse the pandemic itself will get before the effects of vaccination can seriously reduce infection rates.

Yet Republicans have fought tenaciously—even contributing to their own loss of the presidency—in order to block desperately needed funding for health care and education to state governments.

In other words, the economic situation is so similar to 2009 and the asymmetric partisan polarization in the US has gotten very much worse. So there's every reason to believe the Republicans will continue to run the same kind of obstructionist strategy against Biden-Harris that they ran against Obama-Biden. And, as Weisbrot rightly says, it was "a resounding success, from their point of view." In fact, as we see in the fight over the second relief package, they have already put it into motion.

The worst months of the COVID pandemic and of the recession will happen under the new Administration. And they will need to move quickly on actions like state and local government funding that require Congressional approval. Just blocking support for state and local governments for a few months will be more than enough to drastically raise unemployment and make recovering from the recession notably more difficult. And the Republicans will try to blame the Democrats for that, just like they did successfully with Obama.

That's why it's so critical for the new Democratic Senate to abolish the filibuster rule. The Republicans were remarkably effective at obstruction in 2009 when the Democrats had a large majority in the Senate, not a razor-thin one like in 2021.

In fact, it's so critical that if the Senate does not eliminate the filibuster, I'm going to assume that is the result of a conscious decision by Biden, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi. Even though it's technically the Senate's decision with Kamala Harris to break a tie vote, that is so critical to what the new Administration can get enacted in the critical 201-2 period that I don't believe keeping the filibuster would happen unless all three leaders agree. I don't care how much of a weenie Joe Manchin is. This is where Biden has to use all those years to Senate dealmaking to make sure all 50 Democratic Senators are on board with abolishing the filibuster.

The filibuster provided Obama a theatrical excuse for not approving the public option in the Affordable Healthcare Act, in which Joe Lieberman became the decisive figure in killing the public option, as Ryan Grim relates in Chapter 11 of his book We've Got People (2019). Obama had already agreed with the health-insurance lobbies that the public option would not be included. According to Ryan's account, Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid seems to have made a serious and nearly successful push to get it in the ACA. But Lieberman nixed it in the end, relying on his ability to vote with the Republican to block debate - and he was backed up by Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel. And those reluctant to recognize or admit 5Obama's conservative streak could shrug their shoulders and say, "Gee, what could we do? We tried. And the Republicans blocked us." (See also: Max Fisher, Why Obama Dropped the Public Option The Atlantic 02/24/2010; Miles Mogulescu, NY Times Reporter Confirms Obama Made Deal to Kill Public Option Huffpost 05/16/2010)

BTW, the Democratic Senate in 2009 could also have abolished the filibuster and chose not to.

Neera Tanden's Center for American Progress (CAP) has an explanation of the filibuster, which takes not of its very undemocratic nature in an institution like the Senate, where the population of the smaller states is already very disproportionately represented. "Consider that the 21 states with the fewest residents, who collectively have enough Senators to filibuster legislation, make up only 11 percent of the total population." (Alex Tausanovitch and Sam Berger, The Impact of the Filibuster on Federal Policymaking 12/05/2019)