Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema Still Have Creepy, Weird AF Filibuster Fetish
Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema Still Have Creepy, Weird AF Filibuster Fetish
No one asked them.
Joe Manchin is one of the country’s least popular senators who isn’t Kyrsten Sinema. His approval rating is so dismal that he declined to run for re-election because he could see defeat looming ahead like a Titanic-shaped iceberg.
Vice President Kamala Harris has assembled a vast pro-democracy coalition that includes Dick Cheney and Bernie Sanders. She probably doesn’t want or need Manchin’s piddly endorsement, but she’s not getting it anyway. The soon-to-be former senator from West Virginia announced earlier this week that he couldn’t bring himself to vote for the non-fascist candidate because Harris supports eliminating the filibuster to pass abortion rights legislation.
“Shame on her!” Manchin said in what we can hope was his farewell speech. “She knows the filibuster is the Holy Grail of democracy. It’s the only thing that keeps us talking and working together. If she gets rid of that, then this would be the House on steroids.”
The cameras were still present, so he went on: “That ain’t going to happen. I think that basically can destroy our country and my country is more important to me than any one person or any one person’s ideology ... I think it’s the most horrible thing.”
Harris supports a filibuster carveout specifically to restore reproductive rights to a majority of American citizens, who only lost those rights when the MAGA Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Donald Trump was elected with a minority of the vote and appointed three far-right justices who were confirmed by a Republican Senate representing a minority of voters. Meanwhile, most of the new abortion bans in Republican-run states were passed on party-line votes.
This is hardly a radical new position, either. Joe Biden supported a filibuster exception for abortion rights almost immediately after Roe was overturned two years ago.
Manchin is MAGA
Joe Manchin absurdly describes the filibuster as the “Holy Grail of democracy” when it actually functions more like a dirty Solo cup of flat Mountain Dew. When Republicans were in the majority, they made little effort to work across the aisle, and when they’re in the minority, they reflexively oppose and obstruct any Democratic legislation. This arrangement seems to suit Manchin just fine, and I think that’s because he fundamentally believes the country works better when white men call the shots. He’s slightly more polite about it than Rep. Clay Higgins but ultimately, in word and deed, he supports and advances policies that preserve the power of a shrinking white majority.
Manchin idolizes the Senate and its secret-handshake rules. However, the Senate is fundamentally broken as a democratic institution. Because of demographic distribution, rural white Americans have greater influence in the Senate than people of color. That’s not a coincidence. After the Civil War, freed Black people equalled or outnumbered white people in many Southern states. A post-Reconstruction campaign of racial terror chased Black people out of their homes, while helping maintain an apartheid state for those who remained. The U.S. government was only happy to oblige. West Virginia is 92 percent white, and its residents would never tolerate a scenario where, say, a smaller, predominately Black state of East Wakanda had an equal amount of senators. Manchin does not appreciate America’s growing multicultural democracy, and he believes that institutional “norms” like the filibuster help keep that unruly democracy in permanent check. In Manchin’s mind, releasing the filibuster’s leash would destroy his country.
Manchin said the “60-vote threshold is essential to maintain the longevity we need in our bills,” followed by some more BS. The 60-vote threshold is barely older than Star Wars. Previously, it required 67 votes to break a filibuster, and a senator couldn’t just invoke it. They had to stand on the Senate floor for days, and contrary to Manchin’s delusions, the filibuster didn’t promote bipartisan cooperation, it paralyzed the Senate.
Barack Obama called the filibuster a “Jim Crow relic,” which is not just his opinion. Walter Mondale, who represented Minnesota in the Senate, wrote in his 2010 memoir, “The Southern segregationists had lost the major battles over civil rights, but [Sen. James Allen of Alabama] still stood for a small reactionary bloc that continued to fight rearguard actions against almost all social justice legislation.”
Allen was a master of the filibuster and even sucked on tubes of cherry glucose to maintain his stamina while obstructing civil rights. He didn’t filibuster so the Senate would pass enduring legislation. He filibustered because he didn’t want legislation to pass at all.
If actual principle guided Manchin’s demand for a 60-vote threshold, he shouldn’t have voted to confirm Donald Trump’s judicial nominations, including Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, unless Senate Republicans guaranteed 59 other votes. Instead, he went along with Mitch McConnell’s right-wing radicalization of the federal judiciary — even boasting about his support for Trump’s judges.
January 6 only amplified Manchin’s Neville Chamberlain tendencies. He kept talking about bipartisan “unity,” which he demonstrated at the 2022 State of the Union address, when he sat in the Republican section next to Mitt Romney. Apparently, Americans were meant to see two rich white men living together in perfect harmony and think, “Oh Lord, why don’t we?”
Manchin didn’t spend the past four years supporting the multiracial coalition that elected Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Instead, he’s elevated the MAGA heckler’s veto over any legislation that would protect voting, abortion, or LGBTQ rights.
When Manchin left the Democratic Party in May and registered as an independent, it was more than just a desperate move to salvage his political career. If he can no longer constrain the Democrats’ multiracial coalition, he will publicly reject it. Earlier this month, he endorsed former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan for Senate over Democratic nominee Angela Alsobrooks, who’s also a Black woman. When Biden withdrew from the race, Manchin’s preferred replacements were Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who I’ve confirmed are not Black women.
It’s hardly a surprise that Manchin won’t endorse Harris. He has never thought she belonged in his restricted political country club. He freaked out early in the Biden administration when Harris gave an interview to West Virginia media without “telling” him.
Sinema is Sinema
Kyrsten Sinema from the Sinema Party also rushed to defend the filibuster from people who support actual democracy. She posted on social media, “To state the supremely obvious, eliminating the filibuster to codify Roe v Wade also enables a future Congress to ban all abortion nationwide. What an absolutely terrible, shortsighted idea.”
There’s nothing stopping the GOP from banning abortion nationwide if they gain power. If Sinema’s answer is their honor, she’s a bigger chump than I realized. Republicans are set to further roll back abortion rights in multiple other ways, including using the Comstock Act on day one of a Trump second term.
The One-Term Senate Wonder has seemingly forgotten that the GOP failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act because it’s very difficult to advance unpopular legislation. It’s why the GOP prefers using the courts. It’s why the Trump justices straight-up lied during the confirmation hearings about Roe.
Republicans only needed a party-line vote to confirm justices. Why wouldn’t Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett go ahead and admit that they didn’t consider Roe settled law because they planned to unsettle the hell out of it the first chance they got? They obfuscated because overturning Roe was extremely unpopular.
Republicans in the Senate have tried to avoid getting their hands dirty on abortion. Confirming a Supreme Court justice maintains plausible deniability but voting to ban abortion outright is much riskier. The reason Trump hems and haws about signing an abortion ban is that a Republican presidential candidate can’t reach 270 electoral votes with Alabama and Tennessee alone. Republicans would lose several key battleground states if they openly supported a ban.
The greater concern about a nationwide abortion rights bill is that the MAGA Supreme Court would find some way to overturn it. That’s no reason to give up but that is a reason to expand the court so it’s no longer the GOP’s unaccountable judicial arm.
And even if someday a radical GOP Congress passes a national abortion ban that President Marjorie Taylor Greene would sign, an abortion rights bill would save lives now. What’s “shortsighted” is letting pregnant women bleed out in parking lots or just continue existing as second-class citizens until Democrats have 60 votes in the Senate, which won’t happen until a week from never.
At the recent All-In-Summit in Los Angeles, Sinema was all in for herself, as usual. She announced at a panel that she planned to cash out in the private sector next year, which is a surprise to no one. She described herself as “fairly libertarian,” like any obnoxious college freshman who got halfway through The Fountainhead, and claimed she’s “overqualified” for the presidency. Of course, I think one of the most basic qualifications for the top job is that you’re not run out of town on a rail after a single term in the Senate, but while egomania is one of Sinema’s more prominent traits, politically savvy and basic concern for her constituents are not.
Ultimately, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema care more about themselves and less about true democracy than Liz Cheney and Alberto Gonzales. Yes, we probably still could’ve predicted this.
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Traitors
He doesn’t even go to school here