Joe Manchin begins caving on the filibuster
Everybody’s least favorite Democratic Senator Joe Manchin has spent the past week making a mess of things. He killed the Neera Tanden nomination for personal reasons. Then he forced a minor change to the COVID relief bill for no good reason. He’s now being portrayed as having a magic wand and controlling the Senate agenda going forward.
But as Palmer Report likes to point out, nothing works that way. No one in politics ever has a magic wand. In fact one of the few consistent things about politics is that each time a politician makes a unilateral power play on a certain issue, it leaves that politician with less muscle going forward, not more muscle.
Sure enough, Manchin now appears to already be reaching the point where he knows he has to begin coming back to the Democratic pack, for fear of becoming a powerless pariah. This morning he appeared on Meet The Press and stated that he’s willing to find ways to make it more “painful” for the Republicans to use the filibuster. In other words, Manchin is beginning to cave. He still doesn’t want to kill the filibuster entirely, but he’s openly talking about ways to water down the filibuster to the point that it’s not an effective tool.
Manchin also stated that he could see using reconciliation to pass the HR1 voting rights reform bill with just 50 votes. Current rules don’t allow that, but as Palmer Report pointed out at the very start of the Senate session, the Democrats can simply change the reconciliation rules as they go, just as they can change the filibuster rules.
We know what you’re thinking: after this past week, why should Joe Manchin be trusted? Perhaps he shouldn’t. But the point is that he’s now going on television and saying these things because he knows he’s stretched his influence too thin. What’s crucial is that Manchin is now publicly throwing his weight behind finding a way to pass HR1, which means we can hold him to it going forward. As Palmer Report has said all along, when it comes to making the liberal agenda happen, working around the filibuster can be every bit as effective as killing the filibuster.
