By now I think I have made myself abundantly clear that I think Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) is a naive fool who is putting the very survival of our American democracy at risk by appeasing a radicalized anti-democratic insurrectionist GQP with his version of Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time,” insisting that he can negotiate “bipartisanship” on major legislation with at least ten Republican senators to defeat the Jim Crow relic Senate filibuster rule.
The lazy media villagers should be asking themselves, where is the evidence that Joe Manchin has ever successfully negotiated “bipartisanship” on major legislation with at least ten Republican senators? Anyone? Show of hands. That’s what I thought. Never, to the best of my recollection. So why do the lazy media villagers keep falling for his shtick? Whose interests are they serving?
Greg Sargent at the Washington Post has seen enough of Manchin’s act. If Joe Manchin really believes this about the GOP, we’re in serious trouble:
As the GOP’s slide into extreme radicalization continues, Democrats from districts and states with a lot of GOP voters in them face a brutal political problem.
On the one hand, that radicalization is putting pressure on them to level with voters about the unilateral threat Republicans pose to democratic stability. On the other, these Democrats’ electorates require them to appear bipartisan and moderate, which is hard to maintain when calling out GOP extremism with the clarity it requires.
A new initiative from Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) seeking bipartisan support for voting rights protections neatly captures this tension. It also illustrates why Democrats must find a way to resolve it. If not, the prospects for strengthening democracy will grow dimmer.
Manchin has just released a joint letter with Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) calling on Congress to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act. Manchin supports this, rather than the more sweeping pro-democracy reforms that Democrats are championing.
Manchin’s letter says again and again that Congress must protect voting rights on a bipartisan basis, in keeping with his insistence that any new democracy reforms must have GOP support.
But the letter offers an astounding distortion of recent political history:
Since enactment, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been reauthorized and amended five times with large, bipartisan majorities. Most recently, The Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006 passed the United States Senate 98-0 without a single dissenting vote. Protecting Americans’ access to democracy has not been a partisan issue for the past 56 years, and we must not allow it to become one now.
What I’ve emphasized there is deeply divorced from reality — dangerously so, in fact. Yes, those older initiatives passed with broad bipartisan support. But in recent years, it is a central fact about our politics that protecting voting rights absolutely has become a partisan issue.
This trend dates back at least to Barack Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential election, which persuaded Republicans to fear demographic change. As my book recounts, after the 2010 GOP takeover of state legislatures, and after the Supreme Court gutted the requirement that some states and localities get federal preclearance for voting changes in 2013, GOP voter suppression laws and extreme gerrymanders escalated.
While the Democratic Party does have its own history of gerrymandering, and may still engage in some this cycle if reforms don’t happen, in recent years that has become less acceptable to them. Instead, they’ve increasingly embraced nonpartisan redistricting commissions [a key provision of the For The People Act.]
[I]ndeed, even as Democrats are pushing this, Republicans are boasting that extreme gerrymanders will help them win the House in 2022, and they’re escalating the suppression tactics in states across the country.
In short, broadly speaking, Republicans favor contracting voting access and maximizing legislative control relative to actual vote share wherever possible. Democrats favor expanding voting access and ensuring that legislative control more closely aligns with vote share wherever possible.
Thus it is that strengthening and protecting access to democracy is indeed a partisan issue. And acknowledging this is difficult for politicians in swing districts, let alone deep red states such as West Virginia. But it’s the Rubicon they must cross before we can get serious progress.
[M]anchin does not want to confront the existence of this fundamental difference.
He’s pushing a version of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, one that would restore the need to seek federal preclearance for voting changes but apply them to all 50 states. We do need a measure like that, but it isn’t nearly enough.
As I pointed out yesterday, it is directly contrary to the “remedy” suggested by Chief Justice John Roberts in his opinion in Shelby County v. Holder. A 50 state preclearance provision would just invite Justice Roberts to strike down the VRA reauthorization again. Is this naive fool Manchin even aware of this? If he is, is he just setting up the bill to be struck down again by the court?
It wouldn’t proactively expand voting access or do anything about anti-majoritarian gerrymanders, one of the central anti-majoritarian weapons the GOP will wield to take power and block the Democratic agenda.
Manchin apparently believes his proposal can get 10 GOP Senators to break a filibuster [he only has one]. He is refraining from supporting more robust reforms, believing they won’t win GOP support, and he refuses to entertain nixing the filibuster, without which those reforms will never pass.
Which brings us back to Manchin’s big error. The idea that even his intermediate proposal might win 10 Republicans seems very hard to believe. And his demand that broader reforms must also win 10 Republicans is out of touch with the reality of today’s GOP.
This will have dire consequences. As Ari Berman points out, keeping the filibuster imposes a supermajority requirement on expanding voting rights, even as GOP legislatures are dramatically restricting them everywhere on a majoritarian basis, rendering this “total asymmetric warfare.”
It may be that Manchin does anticipate that Republicans can never be won over, after which he might more seriously entertain ending the filibuster and acting. But if not — if Manchin believes Republicans can be enticed to meaningfully protect voting rights — he is consigning us to a near-term future in which their fate will be shaped by precisely that sort of asymmetric warfare.
Here’s the bottom line: Protecting access to democracy will indeed require a partisan solution. That is, such protections will be implemented almost entirely by one party, if not entirely by it, or they won’t be implemented at all.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer needs to set a deadline, the end of this month at the latest, for Prima Donnas like Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to produce ten Republicans for a voting rights bill they think they can pass. It’s put up or shut up time. Their appeasement of a radicalized anti-democratic insurrectionist GQP threatens the very survival of our American democracy. Time is of the essence. Redistricting begins in earnest this summer. There is no more time to waste on humoring their vanities.
Democrats had better heed the warning of former Republican strategist Rick Wilson. He knows these people. He knows the serious threat they pose to our democracy (in the context of the January 6 Commission). Wilson to Dems: ‘Stop Fucking Around’:
On Tuesday, Wilson unleashed an epic 12-tweet thread in which strongly urged Democrats to get on with a Jan. 6 Commission. MaxNewsToday has compiled his tweetstorm and published it in an easy-to-read editorial format. It has been edited for clarity.
Of course, Qevin McCarthy opposes a bipartisan January 6th Commission.
If the Democrats have the stones to pull it off — an open question, to be honest — it will make Benghazi look like a sewing circle.
They can’t possibly look inside the reality of that day and maintain the Big Lie. They can’t admit to the clear causality of Donald Trump unleashing his mob. It opens them to personal, moral and political liability for that day.
More important in their minds is something darker. They see the majority in their grasp, and just as they did in the states this year, they’ll strike quickly, mercilessly and without a moment of hesitation or a scintilla of shame to make the next election the last.
For them, the problem wasn’t an attack on our republic and a democratic election. For Kevin and Company, the problem was that it didn’t work the first time. They need the shock and awe, the spectacle, the Trumphadi terror threat out there.
This zero-sum game of power/not-power is what the Democrats never, ever, ever grasp. This year in the states, the GOP — directed and assisted by Heritage Action — has passed sweeping voter restrictions. Democrats couldn’t mount a response. They played defense.
Even now, too many think policy will save them. “But our climate plan” or “but our control gun plan” or “but our daycare plan” isn’t politics. It’s masturbation. The bad guys are willing to send people to kill you, and you respond with a white paper? Get the fuck out.
This is why the Democrats should stop negotiation over a January 6th Commission and just freaking DO it. Do you think some kind of bipartisan comity and goodwill will be lost somehow? THEY SENT PEOPLE TO KILL YOU. Get a goddamned grip. Play offense. Drag them.
Here’s what you don’t get. The Trump GOP as comprised today isn’t stupid. It’s evil. They’re smart. They’ll play to your goodwill and instinct for a bipartisan veneer on the Jan 6th issue. They’re conning you.
Stop fucking around. Announce the panel. START. Don’t delay. Time is fleeting, and 2022 is roaring into position. You need to nationalize the election over, you know, the little things like whether it’s okay to send a violent, armed mob to the Capitol to overthrow an election.
Washington is a city desperate for an illusion of normalcy and old-school transactional politics. The 2022 election will be defined by someone, very soon. If you want it to be about Antifaaaaaaaaaaaaa and Black Lives Matter and imaginary conspiracy horseshit, keep on delaying.
But when Speaker Marjorie Taylor Greene takes office, let me know how that bipartisan circle jerk worked out for you.
Done.
As I have said several times since January 6, America does not negotiate with terrorists. foreign or domestic. Democrats must go it alone to save American democracy from Trumpism, the new American fascism.
Do the cops or prosecutors ask the suspect(s) for permission to investigate them for a crime? Hell no!
As Rick Wilson says, use the Democratic chaired committees of the House and Senate to investigate the MAGA/QAnon seditious insurrection on January 6, and the complicity of the 147 Republican lawmakers who still objected to the election results even after the Capitol attack. They provided aid and comfort, if not aided an abetted (we still don’t have an answer to the pre-attack reconnaissance tours provided by Republican legislators), to the MAGA/QAnon domestic terrorists. And the Justice Department needs to bring the full weight of prosecution to bear on the instigators of the insurrection. We all know who they are.
https://twitter.com/stuartpstevens/status/1394776573815836672
Asking Republicans to investigate 1.6 is like asking Al-Qaeda to investigate 9.11. The people who helped plan/promote the attack aren’t going to be partners in the investigation.
— Kurt Bardella (@kurtbardella) May 18, 2021
Remember when we wanted to hear what Osama Bin Laden thought about a 9/11 Commission?
Me neither. pic.twitter.com/jKSgFhYDhY
— YS (@NYinLA2121) May 19, 2021
Hey, Democrats.
What did I tell you yesterday about the bad-faith bullshit on the 1/6 commission?
Act. Unilaterally. Use power or it will be taken from you.
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) May 19, 2021
This is necessarily linked to voting rights legislation. Do you ask the people who waged a violent seditious insurrection against the U.S. government to end American democracy and to install a GQP authoritarian regime under America’s first dictator, Donald Trump, promoters of the BIG Lie to undermine the next two elections, for permission to enact voting rights legislation that might prevent their evil plot against America democracy? Hell no!
Democrats must kill or reform the Senate filibuster to pass the For The People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act on their own.
And if Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema continue to appease these domestic terrorists, and we lose our American democracy as a result of their vanity and naïveté, God help them. It will not be just history that condemns them for their cowardice.
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Kurt Bardella follows up his tweet with an opinion at USA Today. “Democrats owe America the facts and nothing but the facts about the Capitol attack”, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/05/19/capitol-attack-we-need-facts-investigate-domestic-terrorism/5152833001/
It makes no sense to expect congressional Republicans to be willing partners in any effort to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol attack that the FBI has labeled domestic terrorism. Their former president’s partisans stormed the building, and they themselves are trying to erase history.
Republicans are whitewashing attack
The only definitive action congressional Republicans have been willing to take related to Jan. 6 is to purge a member of their own leadership for having the audacity to tell the truth about what really went on that day.
This is why the idea of a bipartisan, 9/11-style commission is a bit of a fool’s errand, albeit a necessary one. Democrats gave Republicans everything they could possibly want – including an equal number of members, meaning if a subpoena were to be issued, it would require at least some bipartisan support. Democrats were willing to give Republicans more than they deserved, and more than Republicans ever gave them in recent history. And yet Republicans, led by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, showed their true colors by announcing they oppose the panel.
In a blistering statement, McCarthy called it “counterproductive” and “shortsighted.” As I read it, all I could think of was one word: Benghazi. I don’t remember McCarthy or congressional Republicans expressing any concern or hesitancy during the nearly five years they spent investigating what happened at a U.S. compound in Libya in 2012.
The House Select Committee on Benghazi was formed in May 2014, almost two years after the attack on Sept. 11, 2012, that claimed four American lives. What most people don’t remember is that Republicans began aggressively investigating the terrorist attack as soon as it happened. The first public hearing came on Oct. 10, 2012, almost a month to the day after the attack. Republicans were tripping over themselves conducting multiple, overlapping investigations as every committee of jurisdiction wanted a piece of the Benghazi pie.
We need the whole truth about Jan. 6
Why? Because, as McCarthy famously said to Sean Hannity on Fox News, it was part of a “strategy to fight and win” and damage the presidential prospects of Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of State at the time of the attack.
Say what you want about their motivations, it worked. The Benghazi investigation was the vehicle that paved the way for the “Hillary’s emails” saga.
The shoe is on the other foot now.
Voters have entrusted Democrats with the tools of the majority. They should not hesitate to use them to root out the full and complete truth behind Jan. 6. Republicans will attack their efforts as partisan and politically motivated. Guess what? Nothing Democrats can do will ever stop Republicans from making those charges, so who cares.
The House on Wednesday approved the bipartisan commission, but it may be doomed in the Senate. My advice: Create a commission or select committee, stack it with Democrats, give the chair unilateral subpoena authority, get documents, conduct depositions, hold public hearings, and get the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
We wouldn’t have accepted anything less after 9/11. Why would we accept anything less right now?
Leader Schumer should force the “Grim Reaper of Democracy,” Mitch McConnell, and his gang of Trump cultists to filibuster the January 6 Commission bill. Will simps like Sens. Manchin and Sinema stand for a Republican filibuster of this bill? This may be the best vehicle to eliminate the Senate filibuster rule, because how could Manchin and Sinema possibly stand for a continuation of the January 6 insurrection? Once the filibuster rule is gone, Schumer should tee up the voting rights bills.
you are being generous with sen. manchin. i no longer believe that he is something other than a fifth columnist. certainly he seems to prefer serving mammon before his constituents.