Manchin, Sinema Pan Harris Filibuster Promise
The two most annoying Senators in the Democratic caucus are at it again.
CNN (“Manchin won’t endorse Harris over vow to gut filibuster to codify abortion rights: ‘Shame on her’“):
Vice President Kamala Harris’ vow to gut the Senate’s filibuster rule to pass a bill codifying abortion rights has cost her an endorsement from a leading Senate moderate: Joe Manchin.
The West Virginia independent, one of the staunchest defenders of the potent delay tactic in the Senate, told CNN on Tuesday that he wouldn’t back her candidacy now — despite signaling earlier this month he was getting ready to do so.
“Shame on her,” Manchin, who is retiring at year’s end, said in the Capitol. “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.”
Now that Harris has vowed to gut the filibuster on this issue, Manchin said he wouldn’t back her for president.
“That ain’t going to happen,” he said. “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.”
Manchin, a former Democrat who registered as an independent earlier this year, said he still hasn’t spoken to Harris despite his attempts to do so.
Asked about Harris’ past support for gutting the filibuster, Manchin said: “Well, she said she supported banning fracking too, and she changed that. I was hoping she would change this.”
Manchin’s comments come in the wake of Harris telling Wisconsin Public Radio this week, “We should eliminate the filibuster for Roe.”
Doing so would lower the threshold from 60 votes to a simple majority of 51 to advance legislation to protect abortion rights.
Defenders of the filibuster say preserving the tool forces consensus in the body, unlike in the House of Representatives, where legislation can be rammed through by a majority vote. But critics say the tactic has been abused to prevent the Senate from acting on legislation backed by large swaths of the American public.
Arizona Republic (“‘Absolutely terrible, shortsighted idea’: Kyrsten Sinema slams Kamala Harris on filibuster“):
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema on Tuesday ripped Vice President Kamala Harris’ support for scrapping the legislative filibuster to enact federal abortion rights, drawing praise from Kari Lake, the Republican seeking to succeed her in the Senate.
[…]
In an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio, Harris said the Senate should set aside the rule that effectively requires 60 members to allow a vote that would reinstate protections erased by the Supreme Court in 2022. It essentially reaffirmed a position the Biden administration has held since the high court overturned Roe v. Wade.
“I’ve been very clear, I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe, and get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do,” Harris said.
Her comment drew a pointed rebuke from Sinema, I-Ariz., who has kept a relatively low profile since quitting the Senate race in March.
“To state the supremely obvious, eliminating the filibuster to codify Roe v. Wade also enables a future Congress to ban all abortion nationwide,” Sinema wrote on the social-media platform X. “What an absolutely terrible, shortsighted idea.”
I agree with the two erstwhile Democrats and soon-to-be former Senators that eliminating the filibuster on a single issue is rather silly. Sinema is certainly right that if Republicans were to take control of the chamber, they would be able to pass exactly the opposite law.
But it’s been quite some time since the theoretical arguments for the filibuster bore much resemblance to the reality of its use. We already have to get legislation through both Houses of Congress in the same form and have it signed by the President in order for it to pass. Given the quasi-parliamentary lockstep partisan voting of recent years, that essentially means all three parts of our elected government at the national level have to be in the hands of the same political party despite rather significant structural obstacles to that happening (especially for Democrats). Adding a supermajority requirement in the Senate on top of that makes it nearly impossible to govern.
While Manchin’s endorsement is neither here nor there—OTB projects Trump to win West Virginia’s 4 Electoral votes—touting a policy change she has no power to implement is an odd basis for withholding it. If Democrats didn’t take the chance to end the filibuster in 2021 with their guy in the White House and rare majorities in the House and Senate, they’re not going to do it in 2025.
So the two biggest gasbags outside the Republican Caucus object to getting rid of a relic whose sole use in the past 15 years has been to give outside influence to gasbags?
This sounds like someone debating whether a gas or electric stove would be safer while the house burns down around him.
“She knows the filibuster is the Holy Grail of democracy. It’s the only thing that keeps us talking and working together.”
I’d hate to see what Manchin considers the threshold for Congress working together is. Because it sure isn’t the same as mine.
Two lame duck Senators looking for one final turn on the “fifteen minutes of fame wheel.” Congratulations to the Lame Stream Media and bloggers for giving it to them.
If anyone needed more evidence that the main motivation for these two is attention, here it is.
Neither is going to be the in Senate next year and both will be out of elective politics.
See them soon, I suspect, on a cable channel near you.
It’s not like the President can unilaterally eliminate the filibuster. She would have even less power to do anything about it as President than VP.
@Kingdaddy:
Clearly, you want a gas stove because if there is a land shark nearby, you don’t to be electrocuted by the electric stove–especially if you trip on your way to answer the door to let Hannibal Lecter in as he tries to escape all the wind turbine cancer outside.
Or something like that.
The thing is even back in the day the filibuster was rarely used even though it was available. I remember the vote to allow the construction of the Alaska pipeline passed on one vote despite the fact that it could have been filibusted*.
The filibuster everything innovation was a product of the Republicans (actually more precise the cloture vote). Now the filibuster is broken in its current form.
It used to be that during a filibuster no other business could take place in the senate. Maybe bring that back to discourage needing a super majority to pass everything. Mabey limit how many filibuster you can call per session. The senate was not designed as a super majority chamber and these two chuckle heads calming is it kind of proves that. I’m not sure
* Is that a word 🙂
And that would be good. The choices people make for who represents them should have effects.
Right now, voters can choose a lunatic, and not have to worry that the lunatic would affect anything because the filibuster prevents anything from getting done. And it allows representatives to vote on bills without the fear of them getting passed.
I have faith that if people had to live with what the crazy caucus wants to do, they would vote them out. And I expect that a lot of the Republicans Congress Critters would break from the crazy caucus more often.
It’s easy to vote for ground glass in school lunches or whatever* if you know it will never come to pass.
——
*: to the best of my knowledge, there is no significant support for ground glass in school lunches outside the Freedom Caucus. (And even within the Freedom Caucus, less than half have come out in support for ground glass in school lunches)
@Gustopher: Agreed.
Sinema and Manchin give a passionate defense of what they imagine the filibuster to be.
@Steven L. Taylor: Not me. Don’t have cable and don’t stream news networks. I have to protect what’s left of my frail hold on reality/sanity.
ETA (next post): I’m not positive, but I think it’s only the battery operated electric stoves that are dangerous.
Actually I view the filibuster – cloture to be grossly non-democratic.
But perhaps I just don’t grasp why a simple majority of the chamber doesn’t force end of “debate” after several hours.
If a senator is unable to make an effective case after 4 hours of speaking, either his argument to too weak to persuade or the majority is resolute.
IMHO, the filibuster/cloture maneuver as applied in the Senate is a parlor trick, not a Holy Grail.
I try to imagine a single voter anywhere who might have been persuaded to vote for Kamala ruling her out because of one or both of these two.