Politico reports, Manchin: Primary me if you want, I won’t go ‘nuclear’ (for any filibuster reform):
Joe Manchin made clear that his party’s push to isolate him and fellow centrist Kyrsten Sinema won’t force his hand on rules changes, once again rejecting Democrats’ proposed reforms to the Senate’s filibuster rules.
The West Virginia Democrat actually seems to welcome the isolation [a prima donna diva would]. He told reporters ahead of a Democratic Caucus meeting he would not go along with instituting a talking filibuster – the tradition of the Senate until 1975: the rule changed from 2/3 “of Senators present and voting” to 3/5 “of Senators sworn” – which could be used to evade the Senate’s 60-vote threshold, nor would he entertain a rules change by a simple majority.
The current filibuster rule empowers a tyranny of the minority with veto power over the majority, without ever having to take to the Senate floor to explain their position to their Senate colleagues or to the American people. A senator can simply phone it in that they are a “no.” The Founding Fathers specifically rejected a super-majority vote requirement in the Constitution. The Founding Fathers Rejected Filibusters.
Asked about his party’s priorities, Manchin said people are most worried about inflation and coronavirus right now.
He added that he’d welcome a primary challenge over his filibuster position if he runs again for reelection: “I’ve been primaried my entire life. That would not be anything new for me.”
You can count on it, you arrogant asshole.
“The majority of my colleagues in the Democratic caucus have changed their minds. I respect that. They have a right to change their minds. I haven’t. I hope they respect that too. I’ve never changed my mind on the filibuster,” Manchin said.
Though all 50 Senate Democrats support the voting and elections bill before the Senate, the Democratic caucus is pressing forward with laying blame on Manchin and Sinema (D-Ariz.) for the party’s failure to advance sweeping elections reform, thanks to their resistance to weakening the filibuster.
Manchin said he doesn’t “take anything personally” as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer presses forward with a vote on weakening the filibuster. Schumer confirmed to reporters after the meeting that he would propose a talking filibuster only covering the package of bills currently in front of the Senate and dismissed Manchin and Sinema’s positions as out of step with the rest of the caucus.
“The vast majority of our caucus strongly disagree with Sens. Manchin and Sinema on rules changes. The overwhelming majority of our caucus knows that if you’re going to try to rely on Republican votes, you will get zero progress on voting rights,” Schumer said.
[T]he Senate Democratic caucus huddled on Tuesday evening to discuss the coming confrontation over changing chamber rules to help shore up the Voting Rights Act and enact federal election standards. During the meeting, Manchin “expressed disagreement” with the justification his party is using to change Senate rules, according to one attendee.
Under the talking filibuster proposed by Schumer, the voting and elections package would only require a simple majority to advance toward final passage, preceded by a lengthy debate. No further bills would get the same treatment; the Senate took up the election reform bill Tuesday and is expected to begin the rules debate on Wednesday.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who has been speaking to Manchin on rules changes, said Democrats have tried to come up with a proposal that’s consistent with his and Sinema’s positions and that they aren’t worried the vote will alienate the two centrists.
“I was not a negotiator of the infrastructure bill — I was so happy they were, and I praised them for it, and I voted for it, and it’s going to be great,” Kaine said. “This voting bill is as important or more to many of us than the infrastructure bill. The time is nigh for a decision.”
Last week both Manchin and Sinema emphatically rejected weakening the filibuster, even as Biden came to the Senate to try and marshal their support. Sinema publicly upended the president’s push ahead of his meeting with Democrats, while Manchin reiterated his opposition shortly after the meeting.
Reminder: The “Grim Reaper of Democracy,” Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has abused the Senate filibuster rule more than any single senator in American history, once even filibustered his own bill. Mitch McConnell filibusters himself after Dems call bluff.
Now Sen. Manchin is essentially doing the same thing. He would not agree to the For The People Act and insisted that he, in all his infinite wisdom and magical powers, could rewrite the bill in a manner which would attract 10 votes from his Republican Senate colleagues. He drafted the Freedom to Vote Act. Not one Republican agreed with his infinite wisdom and magical powers. He was publicly humiliated by his Republican colleagues. Nevertheless, this ignorant hillbilly is going to filibuster his own bill because he was a complete failure at marshalling 10 Republican votes with which to shower him with glory for all his infinite wisdom and magical powers.
Too many pundits gave Joe Manchin credit for his “good faith” in taking over to draft the Freedom to Vote Act. This is completely wrong. His plan was always to delay the inevitable as long as possible by any means necessary and to run out the clock on the Biden agenda, just as he did with dangling his supposed agreement to a scaled down Build Back Better bill. This man is a Judas in our midst, a Vichy Democrat collaborator with the enemies of democracy in the Sedition Party. This is bad faith, and a betrayal. Too many in the media fall for Manchin’s “Aw shucks, I’m just a simple country bumpkin” shtick. “Mazaratti Manchin” is a cold, calculating traitor to his party and to his country.
Several other Democrats haven’t made a final decision on rules changes; one of them, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), participated virtually in Tuesday’s caucus discussion due to business in his home state. Kelly is up for reelection this year and has not publicly endorsed changing the filibuster. Sinema also called in, while Manchin attended in person.
UPDATE:
After a year of hedging on the issue, @SenMarkKelly has taken his position. Kelly will support an exemption to the filibuster for voting rights legislation. pic.twitter.com/31jIDKiX6C
— Jeremy Duda (@jeremyduda) January 19, 2022
“We’ve bowed in their direction for months. I think we’ve shown them proper respect,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said. Asked later if Sinema and Manchin had a duty as Democrats to support the rules change, he replied: “I don’t know where their loyalties start and end. They can only answer that themselves.”
Schumer made clear again on Tuesday that the election reform vote and the associated vote to change Senate rules along party lines with a simple majority vote — a maneuver known as the “nuclear option” — would go forward, regardless of its nearly guaranteed failure in the evenly divided Senate.
This is a vote to get every senator on the record for the judgment of history. 50 fascistic Sedition Party Senators + 2 Vichy Democrats who are collaboroators appeasing the Sedition Party and who are betraying their party are filibustering fundamental voting rights.
This is the proper framing, not the lazy media villagers who write B.S. like “President Biden fails to convince Democrats to support his voting rights bill.” Actually, every Democrat will have voted in support of President Biden and his voting rights bill. It is 50 fascistic Sedition Party Senators + 2 Vichy Democrats who have betrayed American democracy who are traitors to their country. Get it right.
Always keep this fact in mind. ‘The Senate is broken’: system empowers white conservatives, threatening US democracy (excerpt):
Critics of the US Senate say that for years now, the chamber has not been a field of fair democratic play, paralyzed by its own internal rules and insulated from the popular will by a 230-year-old formula for unequal representation.
Instead, its critics say, the Senate has become a firewall for a shrinking minority of mostly white, conservative voters across the country to block policies they don’t agree with and safeguard the voter suppression tactics that shore up Republican power.
The numbers are staggering. Currently Democratic senators represent nearly 40 million more voters than Republican senators – but the Senate is split 50-50, with the vice-president, Kamala Harris, wielding the tie-breaking vote. By 2040, 70% of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states, and to be represented by only 30 senators, while 30% of Americans will have 70 senators voting on their behalf, according to analysis by David Birdsell of Baruch College’s School Of Public And International Affairs. The Senate has counted only 11 African American members in its history, out of almost 2,000 total.
“There’s no doubt that the Senate is broken and has been broken for a long period of time,” said Ira Shapiro, a former Senate staffer, Clinton administration trade official and the author of Broken: Can the Senate Save Itself and the Country?. “It’s been in decline probably for 30 years, and that decline has deepened over the last 12 years.”
Structural problems with the Senate in the past have been treated as too ingrained to be fixed. But as urgent social movements struggle toward fruition, a focus on the chamber as the last and greatest obstacle to the free exercise of democracy in the United States has sharpened.
More than two centuries ago, to incentivize small states to join the union, the framers of the US constitution gave every state two senators [the Connecticut Compromise], an arrangement that has always left some citizens vastly overrepresented in the body. But not until recent decades did a clear partisan split emerge in which Democrats were far more likely to represent bigger states, while Republicans represented many small states.
The trend has created an immense discrepancy in the influence that voters from less populous, mostly rural – and white, and Republican – states wield in the Senate, compared with voters from states with big cities and more voters of color.
Today, thanks to urbanization and related shifts, the state of California has 70 times as many people as the state of Wyoming – but each state still gets two senators, giving the small, conservative state the ability to counterbalance the giant, liberal state in any vote on energy policy, taxation, immigration, gun control or criminal justice reform.
As part of this dynamic, Democratic Senate candidates regularly rack up millions more votes overall than Republican candidates – but the Republican caucus, as if by magic, does not shrink, and sometimes even grows.
Few analysts think the basic formula for the Senate will change anytime soon. “I think that of all the things that will not change, the equal representation of every state is at the top of that list,” said Shapiro. “That’s baked into the constitution.”
[T]he filibuster is not the only bulwark of white power built into the Senate, which currently counts only three African American members out of 100 total, next to 68 white men. The disproportionate power of rural states in the chamber translates to a disproportionate power for white voters in general.
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