Senate To Vote On Manchin’s Freedom to Vote Act Next Week: Do Or Die On Reforming The Senate Filibuster Rule

Axios reports, Senate to vote on Manchin-backed voting rights proposal:

The Senate will vote next week on a new voting rights bill backed by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced in a letter to colleagues on Thursday.

The Freedom To Vote Act is the latest attempt by Democrats to counter Republican-led measures at the state level to restrict voting access. Democrats still face the same roadblock to enacting it: the filibuster.

• • • The renewed push comes after Congress tried, and failed, to pass comprehensive voting rights legislation earlier this year.
    • The difference with this bill, Democrats argue, is that it builds off a proposal from Manchin.
    • Manchin also has been engaging with Republicans on the bill in an attempt to garner the 10 GOP votes needed to reach the Senate’s 60-vote threshold for passing major legislation.
    • As of now, it doesn’t appear he has the votes. [He does not have any – the mythical bipartisanship does not exist in the era of the Sedition Party.]

“Senator Manchin has been engaged in conversations with our Republicans colleagues in hopes of advancing solutions on a bipartisan basis to ensure all Americans have their voice heard in our democracy,” Schumer wrote in his dear colleague letter.

Schumer is mocking this delusional hillbilly coal baron. Schumer is trying to teach him a hard lesson. When no Republicans vote for his scaled-down voting rights bill next Wednesday and shatter his delusions that he is some kind of bipartisan magician with Republicans (I don’t know why he believes this, because he has always failed in the past), the gig is up. No more damn excuses about the Senate filibuster. The threat to American democracy from  a radicalized authoritarian Sedition Party that tried to overthrow American democracy on January 6 at a minimum requires a “carve out” for voting rights legislation, if not the outright repeal of the Jim Crow relic Senate filibuster rule. It is do or die on reforming the archaic Senate filibuster rule.

The Washington Examiner reports, GOP poised to filibuster Senate’s voting reform bill next week:

The Senate will take up voting reform legislation next week, the top Democrat announced Thursday, but Republicans are poised to block it, despite centrist Sen. Joe Manchin’s reforms.

Democrats need the support of at least 10 Republicans in order to advance the legislation to the floor for debate.

However, they are unlikely to get a single GOP vote.

[T]he measure is a revised version of a much larger, sweeping election reform bill that all Republicans and Manchin voted against earlier this year.

Democratic leaders tasked Manchin to come up with a bill he could support, then called on him to try to find Republicans to help advance it to the floor. [He failed miserably, as anyone could have predicted.]

Manchin’s proposal, crafted with a group of fellow Senate Democrats, would make Election Day a national holiday and would downgrade voter ID requirements to allow utility bills and other documents in place of a state-issued photo ID. The measure would allow same-day voter registration, mail-in voting, and expanded early voting, as well as new campaign funding disclosure rules.

The bill would also provide matching government funding for political campaigns paired with an end to “dark money” campaign donations.

Democrats have been eager to pass a federal voting reform measure in the wake of changes [voter suppression and vote subversion] made in many red states aimed at bolstering “voter integrity” [code in the GQP for voter suppression.]

Georgia, Florida, Texas, Arkansas, Wyoming, Montana, Iowa, and Kansas are among states that have instituted changes to voting laws affecting polling hours, drop boxes, voter identification, and allowances for third parties to collect and drop off ballots.

New laws also allow Republican-controlled legislatures to disregard the popular vote of American citizens, and to select their own “alternative” GQP slate of presidential electors to send to the Electoral College to steal the election for Donald Trump, setting up a constitutional crisis which threatens the very survival of American democracy.

Schumer, in his letter to fellow Democrats on Thursday, held out hope that Manchin could round up the 10 GOP lawmakers needed to advance the bill next week.

“If they have ideas on how to improve the legislation, we are prepared to hear them, debate them, and if they are in line with the goals of the legislation, include them in the bill,” Schumer said Thursday. “But Republicans must come to the table to have that conversation and at the very least vote to open debate.”

The “Grim Reaper of Democracy,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, in his statement opposing the Manchin compromise bill, called the new plan “fake solutions in search of a problem,” adding, “We will not be letting Washington Democrats abuse their razor-thin majorities in both chambers to overrule state and local governments and appoint themselves a national Board of Elections on steroids.”

While Republicans are likely to block the bill, Democrats can demonstrate their entire caucus backs the measure now that Manchin is on board. [BFD]. Many Democrats hope they can convince Manchin and other centrist Democrats [ahem, Sinema] to eliminate the filibuster.

Democrats should immediately move to reform the Senate filibuster after this show vote fails. Then pass the bill.

President Biden needs to make a forceful case for the reform or repeal of the Senate filibuster before next Wednesday. No more romanticizing about the “good old days” (which were never good) of the Senate when he was a young Senator. That Senate no longer exists and is never coming back.