“Joe Manchin is out of touch with reality if he thinks Republican extremism isn’t the core problem of American politics right now,” tweets Robert Cruickshank. Manchin may be living in the past. But that makes him a problem for Democrats in the present. Cruickshank points to a Vox profile of Manchin that descibes how the man ticks. In his mid-70s, he’s thinking about his legacy:
That legacy will in large part be shaped by what happens in Congress under the Biden administration. For the first time in a decade, Democrats have unified control of government, which theoretically gives them a rare opportunity to pass new progressive laws on a party-line basis. But in practice, the 60-vote threshold to advance legislation past the filibuster dramatically limits what they can do with their party alone (except, again, for budget reconciliation, a process that comes with restrictions and that Manchin has voiced skepticism about using again).
To the immense frustration of progressive activists, Manchin has insisted that this filibuster must stay. He is not the only Senate Democrat with this view — Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) is with him prominently, as are others more quietly. But in March, Manchin perhaps inadvertently gave reformers hope with a series of ambiguous and misinterpreted comments about a rules tweak he could support (requiring filibustering senators to talk on the Senate floor). So he tried to quash those hopes with his Washington Post op-ed in early April.
Some filibuster reformers hope that, as the year goes on, the reality of Republican obstruction will become clear to Manchin and he’ll be driven to change his mind — that Senate rules will in the end be just as negotiable to him as the details of Biden’s stimulus bill. For instance, reformers hoped a GOP filibuster of Democrats’ big voting rights bill, the For the People Act, could spur holdout senators to change the rules to pass it, because it’s so important.
Manchin recoils at the very idea. “How in the world could you, with the tension we have right now, allow a voting bill to restructure the voting of America on a partisan line?” he asked. He says that 20 to 25 percent of the public already doesn’t trust the system and that a party-line overhaul would “guarantee” that number would increase, leading to more “anarchy” like that at the Capitol on January 6. He added: “I just believe with all my heart and soul that’s what would happen, and I’m not going to be part of it.”
That’s the same “But what would the Republicans do?” thinking seen among old-line Democrats for decades. Andrew Prokop writes that then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “concluded that Manchin’s moderation was situational,” and therefore unreliable. “That is, if Republicans ever really needed his vote, they were highly unlikely to get it.” Manchin’s votes with Republicans often were in situations where his vote was not pivotal, but looked good to conservative constituents. Democrat Heath Shuler used to play that game in conservative NC-11, the district now represented by Republican Madison Cawthorn.
The Vox piece references Manchin’s predeliction for cutting deals and having his vote suddenly materialize when the caucus absolutely needed it. What does he want that Biden and Senate Democrats can give him?