It’s Time For Sens. Manchin And Sinema To Put Up Or Shut Up On Their Bipartisanship Act, And To Pass The For The People Act

The Senate Rules Committee marked up S. 1, the For The People Act on Tuesday, and it went as well as you might expect with the Prince of Darkness, the “Grim Reaper of Democracy,” Mitch McConnell making a rare appearance, and two of the insurrectionist senators who voted not to certify the results of the 2020 Electoral College results – Cindy “Mississippi Rebel” Hyde-Smith (R-MS) and Ted “Cancún” Cruz – and to “cancel” over 81 million votes for Joe Biden and install the loser Donald Trump as America’s first GQP Authoritarian dictator serving on the committee.

Note: While Democrats control the committee, it is designed to have a 9-9 even split.

The New York Times reports, Senate Panel Deadlocks on Voting Rights as Bill Faces Major Obstacles:

A key Senate committee deadlocked on Tuesday over Democrats’ sweeping proposed elections overhaul, previewing a partisan showdown on the Senate floor in the coming months that could determine the future of voting rights and campaign rules across the country.

The tie vote in the Senate Rules Committee — with nine Democrats in favor and nine Republicans opposed — does not prevent Democrats from moving forward with the 800-page legislation, known as the For the People Act. Proponents hailed the vote as an important step toward adopting far-reaching federal changes to blunt the restrictive new voting laws emerging in Republican-led battleground states like Georgia and Florida.

But the action confronted Democrats with a set of thorny questions about how to push forward on a bill that they view as a civil rights imperative with sweeping implications for democracy and their party. The bill as written faces near-impossible odds in the evenly divided Senate, where Republicans are expected to block it using a filibuster and at least one Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, remains opposed.

Insurrection leader Ted “Cancún” Cruz demonstrated why he is the most hated man in the Senate (Lindsey Graham: “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.”) Paul Waldman explains that Ted Cruz just sent a very important message to Joe Manchin:

On Tuesday, the Senate Rules Committee conducted a markup of the For the People Act, the Democrats’ election reform bill, and it produced an extraordinarily revealing moment, one that should be of particular interest to Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W. Va.). Sometimes even the phoniest of politicians can stumble into a moment of candor, which is what happened.

That politician is Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) At one point, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine.) referred to a series of proposed Republican amendments to the bill, and asked Cruz a pointed question: “If this amendment and others that you suggest are accepted, would you vote for the bill?”

Cruz responded that the answer is essentially no: “To be candid, it is difficult to imagine a set of amendments being adopted that would cause me to vote for this bill — it would have to be a fundamentally different bill.”

The key here is Cruz’s admission that he won’t support the bill even with the GQP amendments.

As far as Republicans are concerned, everything in the For the People Act is a “partisan power grab.” Anything that gets more people registered, makes voting easier, reduces gerrymandering, limits voter purges, or tries to reveal who’s behind “dark money” — all provisions of the bill — is seen by Republicans as helping Democrats and therefore completely unacceptable.

That might have been slightly less true a few years ago. But in 2021, restrictions on voting — from making mail voting more difficult to outlawing drop boxes to even stopping people from giving a bottle of water to voters forced to wait on hours-long lines — are not just GOP priorities. They have become the central defining goal of the Republican Party.

That party is now organized around the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, and drastic measures must be taken to ensure that Democrats don’t steal future elections.

[N]o Republican will vote for any electoral reform bill sponsored by Democrats. Not one.

Which brings us back to Manchin. There’s an argument about the filibuster and the nature of GOP opposition to the Biden agenda that goes like this. On one side, you have people (like myself) who argue that Republicans are implacably opposed not just to the particular items on the Democrats’ legislative agenda but to the entire idea of allowing President Biden any meaningful legislative victories at all; their political interest lies in Biden being seen as a failure and Congress being seen as ineffectual. Therefore, the only way to achieve anything substantive and produce some measure of democratic responsiveness is to reform the filibuster so legislation can pass the Senate by simple majority.

The other side of the argument, one articulated repeatedly by [Prima Donna] Joe Manchin, is that the filibuster is an important tool to create bipartisanship and that reforming it is unnecessary because Republicans are willing to join with Democrats and pass bipartisan legislation.

[Manchin] must be willing to admit that given how committed the GOP has become to their nationwide effort to restrict the vote, this is one issue on which there is no bipartisanship to be found. Any Republican who even tried would be pilloried on Fox News as a traitor and soon find themselves on the road to excommunication.

They aren’t even trying to argue otherwise. So if electoral reform is ever going to happen, it’s going to have to circumvent the filibuster one way or another. Republicans are holding up a flashing neon sign: We will never, ever cooperate with you on this issue.

Cruz just made this as clear as anyone could possibly ask for. Will Manchin get the message?

Waldman’s colleague at The Post, Jennifer Rubin says It’s time for Democrats to force Joe Manchin to show his hand:

No one should be under the illusion that these [managers’] amendments will persuade any Republicans to support a voting-rights bill. They instead appear to be designed to address complaints from Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), the sole Democrat who has not co-sponsored the bill and who has raised concerns about the lack of flexibility for local voting officials. He seems firmly opposed to dramatic voting reform, but it is unclear what voting provisions he would support. If, as some voting-rights advocates suspect, he is looking to be an obstacle to preserve his standing in a conservative state, they are wasting their time trying to accommodate his demands.

Rather than throwing out proposals with the hope to get Manchin’s buy-in, perhaps it is time to force him to show his hand. What voting reform is he prepared to accept? (It is bizarre, frankly, that Democrats are obsessing about going too far to protect voting rights.)

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Manchin is operating in good faith and would support a limited but substantial list of voting reforms … He would then still need 10 Republican votes, which he seems to think can emerge from open debate and negotiation.

Manchin almost certainly will not find 10 Republicans willing to acknowledge that the problem is not voting fraud but voting restrictions. Given that House Republicans are about to excommunicate one of their leaders for refusing to go along with the Big Lie that the election was stolen, I would guess the task of finding any Republican senator who is willing to dispense with the lie about voting fraud and circumvent state legislatures seeking to suppress voting is virtually impossible. (Are there even 10 Republicans to support a stand-alone H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act?)

That means Manchin will have to make a decision that he seems determined to avoid: If no voting rights bill will ever garner 10 Republican votes, what is he prepared to do about it? The answer may be “nothing.” He currently enjoys cover to avoid tough votes (on voting reform and anything else) if the 60-vote cloture rule remains in place. So long as the filibuster makes passage of controversial bills impossible, he need not go up against home-state conservatives on any issue. He could, of course, support a limited exception to the filibuster (as reconciliation has done) to requires a simple majority to pass legislation that entails constitutional protections, but it is far from clear that would pass muster with him.

Manchin must surely realize that Democratic voters, donors and activists — as well as his fellow officeholders — will not accept a senator who refuses to defend voting rights in the midst of an onslaught of Jim Crow-style legislation. Voting rights and protection of multiracial democracy are so fundamental to the ethos of the Democratic Party (more so than abortion rights, taxes or any other topic) that Manchin risks an irreparable breach with his fellow Democrats should he refuse to block the Republicans’ assault on voting rights. (So long as they pick up a seat or two in 2022, many Democrats would support a primary challenge against Manchin in 2024, even at the risk of losing the seat, if he impedes voting rights reform.)

Democrats should make clear that party members cannot remain in good standing unless they prioritize voting rights over the filibuster. If the red line for Republicans is embrace of the Big Lie, the red line for Democrats is embrace of the Big Truth — namely that democracy is imperiled by Jim Crow-style legislation. Ultimately, Manchin will have to decide whether he stands with advocates of voter suppression or his own party.

And what of our other Prima Donna senator, Kyrsten Sinema, who despite all evidence to the contrary, also asserts “the filibuster is an important tool to create bipartisanship and that reforming it is unnecessary because Republicans are willing to join with Democrats and pass bipartisan legislation”?

Sen. Sinema, unlike Sen. Manchin, is a cosponsor of S. 1, the For The People Act. So where were her alleged mystical powers of bipartisan persuasion over Republican Senators on Tuesday?  Her support for S. 1 is cynical if she also continues to support the Senate filibuster rule.

In a long exposé at Mother Jones, Tim Murphy writes, From Radical Activist to Senate Obstructionist: The Metamorphosis of Kyrsten Sinema (excerpt):

More alarming was her opposition to reforming the filibuster, the Senate rule that allows a minority of senators to block a piece of legislation from coming to a vote. Weeks earlier, Sinema, who rarely speaks to reporters from news outlets that are not based in her home state, had drawn a sharp line during an interview with Politico: “I want to restore the 60-vote threshold for all elements of the Senate’s work,” she said. In the face of united Republican opposition, many Democrats feared such a standard would doom almost every piece of their agenda—from immigration reform to voting rights to LGBTQ equality.

Democrats expected such intransigence from West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, a conservative from a state Donald Trump carried by 39 points, who once shot climate legislation with a gun and whose wife cuts his hair with a Flowbee. But to those who have supported Sinema from the beginning of her career, her heel-turn is more painful. Long before she became one of the Democratic caucus’s most centrist members, Sinema was so liberal she refused to even join the party. From her family’s struggle with poverty during her childhood to her Green Party roots, her rise is the story of striving and adaptation, and of the transformation not just of an idealist, but of a state—from a Republican stronghold she once dubbed the “meth lab of democracy” to a bona fide battleground.

But in the process, Sinema has left some back home wondering whether she’s misread the lessons of her own ascent. As a progressive in one of the nation’s most conservative state legislatures, Sinema abandoned her early radicalism for a new theory of change. She learned to play nice, seeking incremental progress through careful messaging and across-the-aisle relationships, and reinventing herself as a post-partisan deal-maker. But her success was also powered by an army of activists—outsiders like she had once been—operating on a far different theory of change. Now, for the first time in her career, she holds real power. The future of the party and the Senate just might hinge on what Kyrsten Sinema wants to do with it.

* * *

Once in the US Senate, Sinema followed a familiar playbook. Just as she had in Arizona, where she moved her desk next to the Republican Andy Biggs so they could make jokes about their colleagues, Sinema set out to make herself relevant in the GOP-dominated Senate chamber through relentless congeniality. She was a “social butterfly,” one conservative remarked early in her House tenure—the antithesis of the angry Marxist they’d been warned about. Sinema won over Republican colleagues on predawn runs along the National Mall and in bipartisan spin classes she taught in the House gym. (It was her friend Kevin McCarthy’s idea.) A Virginia Republican once spent an hour teaching her how to flip-turn in the House pool. Trey Gowdy became a close friend. As a senator, she now counts Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz as confidants.

Making Republican friends, though, is different from making Republican allies. Not long after she was first elected to the House, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes pressed her on the limits of this approach. “Can you, by force of your personality, bring the Republican caucus over?” he asked.

This is the essential question of Sinema’s long game—it is the tension behind the idea of uniting to conquer. For much of her career she has been identified in the press and by opponents for the ways in which she stands out from her predecessors—bisexual, vegan, nonreligious, and liable to, for instance, wear a purple wig to events as formal as a junior colleague’s swearing-in. But if you strip away the TED Talk bohemianism, she sounds a lot like a very particular sort of senator she once hoped the revolution would purge. Joe Biden’s first book, after all, is also filled with stories of bipartisan comity—how he broke through a curmudgeonly colleague’s wall of resistance to find common ground and Get Things Done.

Sinema believes the solution to what ails the Senate can be found in the lessons of her book—in bipartisan spin classes, in inclusive messaging, in proverbs ripped from Fight Club (“You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake” is a favorite saying). And in many ways it is working for her. Her press releases often read like dispatches from an alternative Washington, in which both parties are working together diligently on an endless stream of low-profile but consequential proposals to expand telehealth programs for veterans, shut down phone scammers, and provide broadband access to Native American communities. Like a lot of people who have flourished in difficult spaces, Sinema is convinced that her method should be a blueprint for others.

Until recently, Sinema and the left have managed to have their cake and eat it too. If she hadn’t evolved, she probably wouldn’t be a senator. And without Sinema, there’s no $1.9 trillion stimulus, no halving of the child poverty rate, no $1,400 checks. She has been at once a model of Old Washington moderation and the 50th vote for what Bernie Sanders called “the most significant piece of legislation to benefit working people in the modern history of this country.” No one would even be talking about a minimum wage increase if Martha McSally still held her seat. As it is, Sinema is reportedly working on an $11-an-hour compromise with a good friend—Mitt Romney.

“She believes in the rules and believes in the processes, and she’ll figure out how to use those rules and processes to her advantage to get things done and bring people into alignment with her goals,” says Chad Campbell, a longtime friend who campaigned for Sinema when she was still an independent and served with her in the state legislature. “She’s better at that than most everybody, but she’s not going to break the rules to get things done, and that’s just the way she operates. She views the people who do that as people who are chipping away at the foundations of how the institutions are supposed to work.”

Excuse me, but there was an armed seditious insurrection on January 6, a failed MAGA/QAnon coup d’etat to overthrow American democracy and to install Donald Trump as America’s first GQP Authoritarian dictator. This was a direct assault, not just “chipping away at the foundations of how the institutions are supposed to work.” The rules of the game have changed.

But even Joe Biden is starting to change his tune on the rules these days. Because, it turns out, making peace with a post-Trump GOP is not quite the same as bringing together the anarchists and pacifists. For one thing, the anarchists are less violent. Her pal Andy Biggs, now an ultra-MAGA congressman, celebrated the January 6 riot by voting to disenfranchise his entire state. Her friend Ted Cruz wanted to argue in the Supreme Court that Texas could throw out Pennsylvania’s electoral votes. What if something is broken that interpersonal relationships can’t mend—what if it’s the entire Republican Party? What if, as Biden has now come to believe, it’s the Senate itself?

* * *

“This is the first time in Kyrsten Sinema’s political life that she has been in power,” Emily Kirkland, the executive director of Progress Arizona told me. In Arizona in the 2000s, “There just wasn’t a lot that was possible. And I think she hasn’t really adjusted to a reality where big things are possible.”

That is what’s driving Arizona progressives crazy right now—the possibility that after finally acquiring power, Sinema simply won’t let Democrats use it. Russell Pearce isn’t her boss anymore. For the first time in her career, Sinema doesn’t have to choose between playing nice and protesting; she can simply agree to change the rules so the Senate works like it’s supposed to.

As Jennifer Rubin said, “Ultimately, Sinema will have to decide whether she stands with advocates of voter suppression or her own party.” It is time for Sen. Sinema to get on the right side of history, and to drop her indefensible support of the Jim Crow relic Senate filibuster rule. If she really supports the For The People Act, now is time for her to prove it. And for her to convince Sen. Joe Manchin as well.

Saving American democracy hangs in the balance.