Joe Manchin Is Delusional If He Believes The GQP Will Negotiate In Good Faith To Protect Voting Rights

Prima donna Joe Manchin gave an interview to Bloomberg News which demonstrates that he is delusional. Manchin Says Any Overhaul of Voting Rights Must Have GOP Support:

Democratic Senator Joe Manchin said any voting-rights legislation must be bipartisan to be accepted as legitimate by U.S. voters, complicating the path to passing a bill that is a top goal of Democratic leaders but opposed by Republicans.

“We should not at all attempt to do anything to that will create more distrust and division,” Manchin told reporters on Wednesday. “So I think there’s enough good that we can all come together. That’s what we should work on.”

Dude, are you serious? What planet do you live on?

MSNBC’s Ari Melber called out Senator Joe Manchin for his “dumb” arguments about bipartisan legislation. ‘I Feel Like I’m Taking Crazy Pills!’ Ari Melber Says Manchin Relying on ‘Dumb’ Bipartisanship Argument as Excuse for Inaction:

Melber remarked, “His literal position is that making this bipartisan is a prerequisite for him supporting it.”

Melber argued that Manchin is part of “an antiquated, distorted and sometimes frankly ridiculous approach to governing in D.C., where politicians’ branding or vanity is put above the jobs, the health, the public interest of hundreds of millions of people.”

“And it’s all for a narrow appeal to DC’s definition of bipartisanship that’s baked into political jargon as if it’s automatically always a good thing,” he said.

Melber said the “DC political class” is still stuck on an “old model of bipartisanship” when that model is now dead in this highly polarized environment. He argued measuring bipartisanship by congressional support is far less productive than measuring it by the support something has with the American public, referencing polls showing many Republicans supporting the covid relief legislation.

He even invoked the famous Zoolander line as he added, “Watching some of the coverage can make you feel a little bit like Will Ferrell’s Mugatu, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”

Melber went back to Manchin to say if the West Virginia Democrat wants to make sure “his own conservative constituents” are on board, that’s one thing, but “if he’s just waiting on some of the most partisan politicians in America, who don’t even represent their districts’ views, to tell him when to vote for something, well, that makes no sense. That is the surest way to play yourself.”

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp just signed a sweeping GQP voter suppression bill passed by a Republican state legislature. Georgia Gov. Kemp signs GOP election bill amid outcry:

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp on Thursday signed into law a sweeping Republican-sponsored overhaul of state elections that includes new restrictions on voting by mail and gives the legislature greater control over how elections are run.

Democrats and voting rights groups say the law will disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color. It is part of a wave of GOP-backed election bills introduced in states around the nation after former President Donald Trump stoked false claims that fraud led to his 2020 election defeat.

Time for a boycott of the state of Georgia.

And it’s not just Georgia. “In Arizona, Republicans are pushing for control over the rules of the state’s elections. In Iowa, the G.O.P. has installed harsh new criminal penalties for county election officials who enact emergency voting rules. In Tennessee, a Republican legislator is trying to remove a sitting judge who ruled against the party in an election case.” Republicans Aim to Seize More Power Over How Elections Are Run. “Nationwide, Republican lawmakers in at least eight states controlled by the party are angling to pry power over elections from secretaries of state, governors and nonpartisan election boards.”

There is no good faith from these authoritarian anti-democratic seditious insurrectionists. They are trying to complete the coup d’etat that the MAGA/QAnon cult failed to do on January 6. America does not negotiate with terrorists, foreign or domestic.

H.R.1 and S.1, the The For the People Act Would Stop Voter Suppression in Its Tracks.

Joe Manchin is turning his back on the Black voters in his Democratic base who elected him to office several times. There will be consequences.

Black civil rights leaders, voting rights advocates and elected officials are ramping up their lobbying of Senate Democrats to nix the filibuster, arguing that they can keep the rule in place or pass voting rights legislation, but cannot do both. ‘They are, in effect, supporting racism’: Black leaders zero in on Dems’ filibuster holdouts:

In a half-dozen interviews, top officials framed the choice as existential for a party that depends on Black and brown voters — and they are planning pressure campaigns privately and publicly to make that clear.

Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader and former presidential candidate, said in an interview that he and others have begun talks to hold town halls and rallies in the home states of senators such as Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), who have said they oppose scrapping the filibuster.

“The pressure that we are going to put on Sinema and Manchin is calling [the filibuster] racist and saying that they are, in effect, supporting racism,” Sharpton said. “Why would they be wedded to something that has those results? Their voters need to know that.”

Manchin remains one of the key votes on any voting rights legislation, like he is for most of the Democratic Party’s agenda in the Senate, where they hold just 50 votes. But he is being targeted specifically by voting rights advocates because he remains the only Senate Democrat not to sign on as a co-sponsor of the For the People Act — which would drastically transform nearly every aspect of the American electoral system, from campaign financing to how elections are conducted.

Manchin said on Wednesday that he wanted to see both parties “come together” on the bill, telling reporters that while there were so many good things in the proposal, “we should not at all attempt to do anything that will create more distrust,” in the election process. And in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Manchin, who co-sponsored the same bill in the previous Congress, suggested the package should be focused just on voting rights, which would likely mean shedding sections on everything from campaign finance to lobbying ethics.

Hailing from a conservative state, the senator may welcome the idea of progressive activists targeting him [without Black voters, he loses.] Nevertheless, Sharpton’s remarks reflect the more intense, personalized push set to come targeting Democratic holdouts on voting rights bills. The longtime civil rights advocate and television personality said Democrats are deploying a “risky strategy” by not pushing rule reforms to pass such legislation. Civil rights leaders, he warned, might have less reason to help generate enthusiasm and turnout in the 2022 midterm elections without being able to point to actual laws Democrats passed.

“Many of us, and certainly all of us in the civil rights leadership, are committed to policies and laws and causes, not to people’s political careers. We’re not into that. We want to change the country,” Sharpton said. “And if there is not feasible evidence that we’re doing that, it is not in our concern to be aggressively involved.”

Color of Change President Rashad Robinson echoed Sharpton’s warnings, saying Democrats risked turning off community validators like his group that are instrumental in getting people of color to the polls.

“What do they expect me to say if we can’t get anything passed? Do they want me to go out and explain to people [what] the filibuster [is]?” Robinson said. “[Voters aren’t] going to want to hear about the filibuster. They’re not going to hear about bipartisanship. They’re going to hear about how you fought back in the face of the barriers that were put in the way.”

Lawmakers and advocates have increasingly recognized that any voting rights-centric legislation — like the For the People Act or the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act, which was named after the late civil rights crusader and would restore preclearance key provisions of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 — cannot pass in an evenly divided Senate that maintains the filibuster, since Republicans remain united in opposition to the bills.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to let either bill see the floor when he controlled the chamber. And during Wednesday’s hearing on the For the People Act — known as H.R. 1 or S.1 — Republicans on the Senate Rules committee, including McConnell, lit into the bill.

There’s your “bipartisanship” from the Party of No, Joe.

Facing that GOP opposition, activists have called for scrapping the filibuster entirely, or for creating a carve-out specifically for voting rights legislation. Though Manchin has previously dismissed a filibuster carve-out for voting rights on grounds that it’s like “being a little bit pregnant,” activists hope it can win over Democratic senators who are uneasy with entirely blowing up the Senate rules.

Sen. Manchin should listen to Sen. Angus King (I-ME). What happens to the filibuster depends on how Republicans play their hand:

[I] believe voting rights are a special case that we must address in light of the nakedly partisan voter-suppression legislation pending in many states. All-out opposition to reasonable voting rights protections cannot be enabled by the filibuster; if forced to choose between a Senate rule and democracy itself, I know where I will come down. As new Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) noted on the floor recently, “It is a contradiction to say we must protect minority rights in the Senate, while refusing to protect minority rights in the society.”

“I fundamentally believe that Congress alone has the ability to create a unified threshold for democracy in our country,” Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams said in an interview. “I believe there needs to be a carve-out, an exemption, a suspension of the filibuster.”

Abrams and others argued that the current exemptions to the filibuster — from Supreme Court nominations to the use of budget reconciliation — and efforts of Republican state legislators to introduce restrictive voting laws opens the door for a voting rights exemption as well. “This is not new,” she said. “I believe that there is both exigency and there is a precedent for creating this [filibuster] carve-out in order to protect democracy.”

The same urgency expressed by those in the activist world has, in recent weeks, been picked up by prominent Black Democratic elected officials. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, one of two Black Democratic senators, devoted his maiden floor speech last week to talking about voting rights and said a “Senate rule” should not stand in the way of them. He also raised the issue of the filibuster with President Joe Biden on a call with Senate Democrats Monday evening.

Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama, the lead sponsor of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, said at a briefing hosted by the Southern Poverty Law Center last week that Democrats need to be “prepared to maybe do away with the filibuster” to pass it in the Senate.

Former President Barack Obama also called for the filibuster to be scrapped when eulogizing Lewis last year, decrying it as a “Jim Crow relic” that stood in the way of protecting voters.

Increasingly, prominent Black activists and lawmakers have tied keeping the filibuster to the era of Jim Crow segregation and other racist institutions in America. It is, they say, fundamentally a block on the power of Black Americans throughout the country.

[R]ev. William Barber II, who led “Moral Mondays” protests in North Carolina, called voting rights and economic empowerment “inextricably bound together.”

If you can’t support getting rid of the filibuster, Barber added, “Don’t tell me you love John Lewis. John Lewis wanted living wages, and he wanted voting rights.

No one elected prima donna Joe Manchin “decider-in-chief” for America. He needs to dance with the ones who brought him to the dance, the Democratic Party and their voter constituencies who overwhelmingly support the For The People Act. It is a matter of political survival for American democracy. If this means reforming or repealing the Senate filibuster rule, so be it.