What Makes Joe Manchin Tick?
And a lot of voting rights updates
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I have to get to a Dr. Seuss book burning sponsored by my local Antifa, so let’s skip the small talk tonight and get right to it!
Whatcha Doing, Joe Manchin?
West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin was very loud and unambiguous yesterday when answering another question about whether he’d ever vote to nuke the filibuster.
“Never!” he screamed. “Jesus Christ, what don't you understand about 'never'?”
OK, but why?
I’ve long wondered what makes Manchin tick. He comes from an increasingly red state, so it’s fair to guess that he likes to stick his thumb in his progressive colleagues’ eyes in order to assert his independence to voters in West Virginia. But the Mountain State is also one of the poorest states in the country, its poverty an affliction as old as the state itself. Since it broke away from Virginia during the Civil War, West Virginia’s abundant natural resources have been exploited and its wealth extracted and distributed to the industrial barons to its north and south.
As a result, West Virginia depends on federal government largesse, and in a new interview, Manchin suggests a long list of infrastructure projects that would fit right in with the New Deal that he cites as his inspiration. The story, in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, paints Manchin as a man who intimately understands the history and pain of the people he represents… but also someone who seems to have an astonishing misunderstanding of national politics at this moment.
Here’s the first quote that baffles me:
“There’s a moment here. I try to explain it to them and you get all this bull — about power and this and that,” he said. “I have watched power destroy people, good people, because they abused it.”
On the surface, he’s not wrong — power certainly corrupts people. All of human history can be boiled down to power corrupting people.
But here’s the thing: Just before that, he also says this, referring to Democrats in the Senate and House:
“That’s the window. That’s it. Two years. That’s all we got.”
He understands that Democrats have two years to get their agenda passed or face high odds of losing their majorities. And given both the paper-thin margin in the Senate and Republicans’ refusal to work with Democrats, the only way for Dems to enact their agenda is to use their power. That means killing the filibuster, overruling the parliamentarian when necessary, and passing, among other things, the legislation that he says he supports, including the aforementioned massive infrastructure spending, immigration reform he endorses, and gun control laws that he cites elsewhere in the story.
Also strange: Manchin said on Fox News last night that he wanted to lower the amount of money going to state and local governments, which is how much of the infrastructure spending would actually happen, as well as lower weekly unemployment payments. The unemployment rate in West Virginia, as you might have guessed, is much higher than the national rate.
Plus, his obsession with bipartisanship is no excuse for further weakening the bill after killing the minimum wage increase — there’s no way any Republican is going to vote for it.
The next Manchin quote is even more telling:
For the next two years, Manchin said, he will be the “spear catcher.” From the far-left to the far-right and in the middle, Manchin said, he expects the hits to come from every angle, on every subject, every day.
And every spear will be taken in the name of bipartisanship, he said. The Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol changed him, Manchin said. It showed a divided country that needs made whole again.
That Trump could contend let alone win is evidence Democrats should not ram through their priorities, he said.
This gets to the heart of the matter. Joe Manchin took the absolutely wrong message from the Capitol insurrection. The people who stormed the Capitol weren’t demanding bipartisanship. They weren’t looking for moderation. They will never vote for Democrats, no matter how much the party kneecaps its own ambitions and priorities.
Further, Democrats will not win elections if they fail to deliver on their promises. If they fail on reviving the economy, forgiving college debt, massively expanding affordable housing, lowering prescription medication costs, creating a public option for healthcare, and rescuing the voting rights under attack, they will absolutely get creamed in 2022. Not being as bad as Trump isn’t going to work four years later.
Unfortunately, Manchin continues to believe that Republicans will work with him in good faith, citing his friendship with Susan Collins, who has proven to be nothing but a Republican partisan. He continues to be stuck in the antiquated politics of 30 years ago, when Democrats thought that screwing over working people would prove their toughness and please conservatives instead of just making things worse and driving disgruntled voters to a GOP that takes advantage of racism and xenophobia.
Manchin also says that he supports an $11/hour minimum wage, citing the fact that it would take a family of three just above the (absurdly low) poverty line of $22,000 a year. He doesn’t understand why people are angry and disaffected. And unless his more progressive colleagues can help him see the light, we could be in big trouble.
Important News You Need to Know
Voting Rights
Georgia: The assault on voting rights raged forward on Monday. The full State House voted on party lines to pass an omnibus voter suppression bill that’s chockful of racist voting changes:
The measure that passed the Georgia House on Monday, House Bill 531, would limit ballot drop boxes to locations inside early voting locations, reduce “Souls to the Polls” voting events to one Sunday during early voting, and require voters to provide a driver’s license number, state ID number or copy of photo ID to request absentee ballots.
In addition, the measure would set a deadline for requesting absentee ballots 11 days before election day, ban organizations from distributing grants to help fund elections and prohibit distributing food and drink to voters waiting in line.
Shortly before that, the ban on no-excuse absentee ballots made it through a crucial committee in the State Senate, bringing it one step closer to making it through the upper chamber. It’s all blatantly bigoted, meant to create long and excruciating lines in urban areas that are overwhelmingly populated by people of color.
Isn’t that illegal? Well, yes… for now.
Supreme Court: And that’s because today, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case of overly restrictive voting laws in Arizona that had been struck down by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. At stake is what remains of the Voting Rights Act, in particular Section 2, which prohibits “voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups identified in Section 4(f)(2) of the Act.”
In 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required states with Jim Crow voting histories to pre-clear election law changes with the Department of Justice. His justification? First, that times had changed and racism was solved. Second, he reasoned that Section 2 would continue to protect minority voters, even if it took years of arduous court cases to receive any relief. Now, the 6-3 conservative majority is aiming to pulverize that clause, as well.
Initial reports based on today’s arguments indicate that the Court is likely leaning toward ruling in Arizona’s favor in at least a narrow decision, with lines like this one, from newly installed Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a pretty solid tell: "There's a difficulty that the statutory language and its lack of clarity presents in trying to figure out when something crosses from an inconvenience to a burden.”
So, basically, instead of trying to navigate a slippery slope, they’re suggesting bulldozing the entire thing, even after the Republican lawyer made startling admissions like this one about why the GOP needs to engage in voter suppression:
“Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats. Politics is a zero sum game. And every extra vote they get through unlawful interpretations of Section 2 hurts us. It's the difference between winning an election 50-49 and losing an election.”
I mean, it was very blatant:
Should SCOTUS go all the way on this case, there will be no stopping Georgia’s new laws or any of the other voter suppression laws being in proposed in GOP states.
Virginia: In addition to passing a state Voting Rights Act, lawmakers in Virginia are getting closer to taking the first step toward ending post-prison disenfranchisement and allow former felons to vote. It’ll require a constitutional amendment, voter approval, and legislative passage two sessions in a row, so even in the best of circumstancs it wouldn’t go into effect in 2024. Right now, it requires acts of the governor to return voting rights to former felons.
Workers’ Rights
The Good News: Joe Biden made history on Sunday night by releasing a video in which he all-but-specifically urged Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama to vote in favor of the unionization effort there. It was the result of pressure from organized labor and groups like More Perfect Union, a cool new progressive media group founded by Bernie Sanders’ former head of comms.
It was the most overt pro-union statement by a sitting president since Franklin Roosevelt, who was actually less vocally pro-union than most people think (he let his actions do the talking, often by not breaking strikes, unlike his predecessors). But it’s not all bread and roses over at the White House.
The Bad News: Seth Harris, the former Obama Labor Dept. official who went on to design the alternative contract worker status that formed the basis for California’s Prop 22, is now working for the Biden administration. In a labor policy position.
You can read more about the legal and political carnage that Harris’s work helped foster in an interview I did with Veena Dubal back in January. As it so happens, there was no official press release or announcement heralding Harris’s hiring, probably because it’s such a bad idea.
Healthcare
Medicaid: One of the Biden administration’s biggest early decisions was to initiate the process that would ultimately lead to the rescinding of the Trump-era rule that permitted states to add work requirements to Medicaid. There are, as expected, some hiccups right now, as GOP attorney generals are examining legal avenues to retaining those rules, which invariably toss tens of thousands of people off of state-subsidized care.
Arkansas: The meantime, Arkansas is moving to “encourage” people on Medicaid to work by incentivizing them with private plans paid for with federal money. They’ll have to get permission from the federal government, which might be a tall task given the direction of the Biden administration’s prefered policy:
Experts said Arkansas will have to explain how the incentive approach wouldn't penalize people who would get moved to the traditional fee-for-service program.
"You can call it an incentive, but really given you're starting in the private (insurance) it seems more like a penalty," Judy Solomon, senior fellow with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said.
North Carolina: The GOP-led legislature has refused for years to heed Gov. Roy Cooper’s call to expand Medicaid, but the combination of new federal incentives and a spike in enrollment might just prove too enticing. The state’s biggest paper, The Charlotte Observer, is now urging them to do so.
Quibis:
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, fresh off a series of terrible decisions that led to mass suffering and dozens of death during the winter freeze and power outage, has evidently decided to one-up himself. Today, he announced that he would rescind the mask order and business limitations that have been in place since the summer, when daily cases of COVID-19 in the state were far lower than they are now. I can’t imagine what will happen next.
This is a great read on budget reconciliation, its very recent history, and why it and the filibuster are being so misinterpreted and absued.
lol:
Weed is legal in New Jersey now, but there’s a long ways to go on racial equity and making up for past mistakes.
Evidently cancel culture is OK when it comes to making pro-environmental protests illegal!
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