I guess we have no choice but cling to hope. What else can we do?
When the Jan. 6 commission became the latest casualty of Republican obstructionism on Friday, most Democrats weren’t surprised. Joe Manchin was.
Manchin, West Virginia’s senior senator and the only Democrat in Congress from a state Donald Trump won by 40 points,has not been convinced that the GOP’s current strategy is scorched-earth partisan politics.
Ahead of Friday’s vote, as Republican opposition to the insurrection commission solidified, Manchin issued a call “imploring” his colleagues to consider passing the legislation. He said he couldn’t imagine why Sen. Mitch McConnell’s conference would block a bipartisan effort to get to the bottom of the attack on the Capitol.
“There is no excuse for any Republican to vote against this commission,” he said, “since Democrats have agreed to everything they asked for.”
That argument was a pitch-perfect distillation of how Manchin views the Senate. How it was received—with just six Republicans voting for the commission—would perhaps indicate to a more mutable senator that his view may be out of step with reality and necessitate eliminating the filibuster, the 60-vote threshold for passing bills.
But not for Manchin.
“I don’t think I’ll ever change,” Manchin told reporters on Thursday. “I’m not separating our country, OK?”
Manchin said later in the day that he thought Democrats could find “10 good people” on the GOP side to support the commission. And on Friday, after Democrats predictably did not find 10 Republicans to support the commission, Manchin sounded genuinely upset and surprised that his GOP colleagues would side with a nakedly partisan view that there shouldn’t be an independent report on the Jan. 6 attack.
“This job’s not worth it to me to sell my soul,” Manchin told reporters on Friday. “What are you gonna do, vote me out? That’s not a bad option—I get to go home.”
On nearly everything of consequence on Capitol Hill these days, Manchin finds himself right where he likes it: at the center of attention and the Senate’s political spectrum. With the chamber split 50-50, Manchin is, and will be, the deciding Democratic vote to pass the central items of President Joe Biden’s agenda. He has the power to freeze the Senate floor for hours if he has a problem with language in a bill. And he has a special ability among his colleagues to broker compromises on an array of issues.
But when it comes to tackling the most high-profile issues, Manchin might be occupying a different political reality than his colleagues. Ask Democratic senators whether Manchin’s notion of bipartisan dealmaking on the thorniest issues is possible and they’ll give some diplomatic answers. They take care to avoid criticizing Manchin, but gently suggest he is wasting his time.“None of this happens if we’re going to engage in magical thinking and believe that the institutional position of the Republican Party is not to systematically disenfranchise as many voters as they can find.”— Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI)
He seemed to care about the insurrection, which indicates he has some concerns about the assault on democracy. Does he care at all about future elections?
Take voting rights legislation, which is of existential importance to Democrats in 2021. Manchin opposes the For The People Act, Democrats’ marquee voting bill. In May, however, he and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) announced they’d push to pass another top priority for Democrats, a voting rights expansion bill named for John Lewis, on a bipartisan basis.
Republicans, egged on by former President Trump, are poised to put up near-uniform opposition to these bills. Democrats question how Manchin’s push can possibly succeed.
“None of this happens if we’re going to engage in magical thinking and believe that the institutional position of the Republican Party is not to systematically disenfranchise as many voters as they can find,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI). To think there would be 10 votes for the John Lewis bill, he said, “strikes me as about 10 miles short of realistic.”
Even GOP senators openly say there’s no compromising on it. “I wouldn’t shortchange him at all,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said of Manchin, “but some of these things are clearly ideological, and so they’re really not subject to negotiation.”
Asked by The Daily Beast last week how he’d win the votes to pass the John Lewis bill while maintaining the filibuster, Manchin didn’t discuss policy specifics. He just said he’d get it done.
“We just keep working,” Manchin said, listing a set of issues that the Senate is tackling. “I have to say, keep the faith in this damn Senate, and we’ll make it, we’ll work it out, make it bipartisan.”
Oh well …