Ari Berman (“Give Us the Ballot“) distilled the absurdity of Sens. Joe Manchin’s (D-WVa.) and Kyrsten Sinema’s (D-Ariz.) obsession with Senate bipartisanship Monday night on MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes”:
It just seems like we are still witnessing a huge game of asymmetric warfare here where there is a 60 vote supermajority requirement in the Senate to pass any legislation protecting voting rights, but in the states Republicans are unilaterally making it harder to vote with a simple majority on party-line votes.
Indeed, Georgia’s infamous SB202 increasing restrictions on voting (including outlawing providing water to voters in lines) passed both house of the Georgia legislature on party-line votes. The same in Texas and in Florida, Berman adds. Arizona Republicans passed SB1485 to remove tens of thousands of voters from the state’s early ballot mailing list on party-line votes as well.
States operate without the filibuster, and have, Hayes noted.
“The entire point of voter suppression is to make it harder for your opponents to be able to vote. And so there’s just two standards here,” Berman continued. “There’s the game being played by Republicans in the states where they do whatever they can to undermine democracy. Then there’s the game being played by Democrats in Washington, where they fail to protect American democracy because of these arcane rules ….”
Sinema argued in support of keeping the Senater filibuster in place in a Washington Post opinion piece Monday. The filibuster is one of “democracy’s guardrails,” she writes. She insists that “the difficult work of collaboration is what we expect in Arizona” while ignoring what just happened in her own state:
My support for retaining the 60-vote threshold is not based on the importance of any particular policy. It is based on what is best for our democracy. The filibuster compels moderation and helps protect the country from wild swings between opposing policy poles.
Sinema stopped short of demanding we institute democracy’s guardrail in 50 state capitols including hers.
On the core questions of majority rule, the rule of law and democracy, on the “idea of people selecting their leaders as opposed to the other way around,” Hayes argued, there cannot be and Republicans will not compromise.
“There is a brick wall of Republican opposition that will either be sledge hammered down, or will just remain blocking us from a path towards a free and equal multi-racial democratic country.”
“Republicans would rather cheat than compete,” Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) tweeted before her appearance.
Mitch McConnell just said no matter what compromises are made, it won’t be good enough, Clark told Hayes. “We are in a fight for the soul of our country.”
Republicans don’t believe in democracy, as I’ve argued again and again. Republicans argue that direct democracy is no more than mob rule (often citing a spurious quote from Jefferson). Then they send a mob to the Capitol to overturn an election. How seriously should Democrats take them as good-faith partners in running a democracy?