“Manchin did something unexpected: He released a long list of voting reforms that he does support, potentially scrambling the congressional debate over voting rights as the Senate prepares to vote on Democratic leaders’ proposal.
Manchin’s list includes many reforms drawn from the For the People Act as well as from a companion voting rights bill known as the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Significantly, Manchin endorsed banning partisan gerrymandering — a high priority for both small-d democrats and large-D Democrats, who want to prevent the GOP from seizing control of the House of Representatives with rigged congressional maps.
Not everything on Manchin’s list will delight his fellow Democrats. He proposes a nationwide voter ID law, for example, although not an especially strict one. And he wants states to be able to engage in “maintenance of voter rolls”— purging names from the state’s list of registered voters — using state and federal documents to identify which voters should be purged.
Manchin would also water down the John Lewis Act, a bill that seeks to restore voting rights protections that the Supreme Court gutted in 2013 — though Manchin’s weaker version of the John Lewis Act would still be much more protective of voting rights than current law.
The West Virginia senator’s proposal, in other words, falls short of the dreams of Democratic leaders and voting rights advocates who rallied behind the For the People Act, which passed the House in March. And it is still almost certainly doomed unless Manchin agrees to eliminate the GOP minority’s ability to filibuster voting rights bills — a move Manchin has thus far rejected — or somehow miraculously musters support from 10 Republicans (in addition to all 50 Democrats).”
“Senate Republicans spent months praising Joe Manchin for his insistence on cross-party compromise. Next week they will almost surely end his hopes for a bipartisan deal on elections.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he believed all 50 Republicans would oppose Sen. Manchin’s (D-W.Va.) slimmed-down elections compromise, which focuses on expanding early voting and ending partisan gerrymandering in federal elections. And it’s not clear there’s a single Republican vote to even begin debate on the matter, potentially dooming Manchin’s proposals before they can even make it into the bill.”
“Because voters increasingly back the same party in congressional and presidential races, only six of the 100 currently serving senators are from a different party than the one their state backed in the 2020 presidential election.1 Even among that group, Manchin stands apart. Hillary Clinton and Biden were completely trounced by Donald Trump in West Virginia in 2016 (42 percentage points) and 2020 (39 points), respectively. But in 2018, Manchin won in West Virginia (by 3 points) despite an aggressive GOP effort to defeat him.
In fact, considering the extreme GOP lean in West Virginia, Manchin’s 2012 and 2018 victories are two of the most impressive wins of any American politician in the 21st century.”
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“However he is doing it, though, Manchin’s winning a very red state gives him incredible power. He is a lifelong Democrat and seems committed to the party. But he doesn’t really owe Biden, his fellow Senate Democrats or the formal Democratic Party much of anything — his political brand is really separate from theirs.”
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“it’s not clear that Manchin’s behavior is totally, or even mostly, electorally driven. First, we’re not positive that Manchin will run again. The West Virginian will be 74 in August. So, if he seeks another term — he’s up for reelection in 2024 — he would essentially be planning to remain in the Senate until he is 83.”
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“even if Manchin is running and thinks he can win, it’s not totally clear that his moves right now to limit Biden’s agenda are that electorally helpful. Manchin no doubt benefits electorally from keeping some distance from the Democratic Party. At the same time, can Manchin really earn a lot of votes by pushing Democrats to offer people $300 a week in federal unemployment benefits instead of $400, as he did during the stimulus negotiations? Will West Virginia swing voters in 2024 remember and appreciate that Manchin wouldn’t go along with Biden’s nominee to run OMB? On both questions the answer is probably not. In fact, on the most-high-profile issues (the stimulus package, Trump’s impeachments), Manchin tends to vote with his party.”
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” the West Virginia senator seems to sincerely disagree with the dominant view among Democrats that the GOP is totally unwilling to work with Democrats when a Democratic president is in office. Manchin argues that there is real potential for bills pushed by Biden and Democrats to get support from at least a few GOP lawmakers if Democrats really try to work with the GOP. He is balking at changing the filibuster rules in part because he thinks that bipartisanship is possible but neither party is trying hard enough.”
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“The evidence is considerable that the overwhelming majority of Republicans on Capitol Hill aren’t going to support any major policy initiatives backed by a Democratic president. So Manchin’s view of his GOP colleagues seems somewhat untethered from reality. But his optimism about the potential for bipartisanship makes sense from his perspective. After all, Manchin is friendly with a lot of Republicans on Capitol Hill, most notably Collins. He and a bipartisan group of lawmakers were key figures in passing a COVID-19 relief bill in December.”
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“Manchin may not see the contentious issues of the day — in particular, the filibuster and voting rights — in the extremely high-stakes, democracy-in-peril, “Jim Crow in new clothes” way that other Democrats do. West Virginia is not Georgia, which has a Republican coalition dominated by white people trying to hold on to power by any means necessary against a growing Democratic coalition in which people of color are the majority. West Virginia’s non-Hispanic white population is 92 percent, much higher than the nation overall (60 percent). I’m not suggesting that Manchin doesn’t care about Black voting rights, but he doesn’t have a huge Black constituency pressing him on this issue, as only 4 percent of West Virginians are Black (compared with 13 percent in the nation overall).”
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” it’s entirely possible that Manchin really cares about voting rights but thinks that getting rid of the filibuster and passing election-reform legislation on party-line votes is bad electorally for the broader Democratic Party (not just for him) and worse than Democrats trying to win elections even after some of these GOP-backed voting laws are in place. Manchin, as I noted earlier, seems deeply committed to the Democratic Party. But he might disagree with the dominant electoral thinking in the party. After all, emphasizing bipartisanship is Manchin’s strategy, and he’s the one winning in a super-Republican state.”
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“Manchin seems to be ideologically to the right of most congressional Democrats, electoral considerations aside. In a Democratic Party that is increasingly organized around pushing for economic and racial equality, Manchin and the party’s more liberal members are essentially from different planets. There is little evidence that Manchin got into politics to implement his deeply held vision for changing the American economy (like Sen. Elizabeth Warren) or its racial policies (Sen. Raphael Warnock). Manchin is more an old-style politician. He grew up in a small coal mining town in West Virginia (Farmington), where his father and grandfather had both been mayor. In 1982, at age 35, he was elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates and climbed the ladder from there — state senator, secretary of state, governor, U.S. senator.
“Joe Manchin was always a center to center-right Democrat,””
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“Put all that together and the Democratic Party’s fate is in the hands of a man who doesn’t owe the party anything, can’t support some of its agenda for electoral reasons and probably just disagrees with some of that agenda anyway. Much of the Democratic Party believes that the biggest problem in politics is that the GOP is becoming anti-democratic and that this anti-democratic drift is an emergency for the country. Manchin sees the Republican Party as including people he can work with and seems to think that the biggest problem in politics is that elected officials on both sides aren’t being bipartisan enough. This difference in views between Manchin and much of the rest of the party may be irreconcilable. But if they aren’t reconciled, Manchin’s view will win out, because he has a deciding vote and seems very much willing to use it.”
“under a “talking filibuster,” any “member of the minority party can filibuster as long as he/she stays put on the floor.” But once a member finishes speaking, the filibuster would end, and “there’d be a vote at a simple majority threshold” of 50 votes, instead of the existing 60-vote threshold required to end a filibuster.
That’s a big change, because there’s currently no actual filibustering required to filibuster in the Senate, at least not in the conventional sense. As Vox explained back in 2015, the modern filibuster doesn’t require a senator talking on the floor for hours on end to delay a bill.
Instead, today’s filibuster is a straightforward move to reject unanimous consent on a bill that the minority can wield painlessly”
“In 1805, fresh off the duel where he killed Alexander Hamilton, Vice President Aaron Burr returned to the Senate and proposed streamlining the body’s rules by eliminating something called the “previous question motion,” a process that was rarely invoked in the early years of the Senate.
As Sarah Binder, a Brookings Institution expert on Congress and a professor at George Washington University, explained in 2010 testimony to the Senate Rules Committee, Burr’s intent was to produce a “cleaner rule book” that wasn’t too thick with duplicative procedures. And he thought the previous question motion was the kind of superfluous rule that could be eliminated.
Unfortunately for the nation, the previous question motion wasn’t the least bit superfluous. This motion turned out to be the only way to force the Senate to move off a particular topic. When the Senate took up Burr on his call, it allowed senators to lock the Senate into endless, pointless debate — halting progress even if a majority of the Senate wished to move forward to a vote.
The filibuster was born.
Since then, the rules permitting filibusters have been changed many times — and with increasing frequency.
In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson successfully urged the Senate to create a process, known as “cloture,” which would allow a two-thirds majority of the Senate to break a filibuster and bring a matter to the Senate for a final vote. The number of votes necessary to end a filibuster, whether on a piece of legislation or on a confirmation vote, was reduced to three-fifths of the Senate (ordinarily 60 votes ) in 1975.
In the 1970s, Congress created a process known as “budget reconciliation,” which allows many taxing and spending bills to become law with a simple majority vote, bypassing the filibuster. In 1996, Congress enacted the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to overturn recent federal agency regulations without having to deal with the filibuster.
And in the present-day Senate, filibuster reforms have been enacted fairly often. In 2011, a narrow Senate majority voted to strip away some of the minority’s power to force votes on amendments to a bill. In 2013, the Senate enacted a temporary measure that limited the minority’s ability to delay confirmation votes once the Senate agreed to end debate on a particular nominee, and a version of this rule was made permanent in 2019 (though nothing is truly permanent because a future Senate could always change this rule again). The Senate voted to allow non-Supreme Court nominees to be confirmed with a simple majority vote in 2013, and it voted to allow Supreme Court justices to be confirmed by a simple majority in 2017.
Indeed, this brief account of the filibuster’s history drastically undersells how often Congress creates exceptions. In her book Exceptions to the Rule: The Politics of Filibuster Limitations in the US Senate, the Brookings Institution’s Molly Reynolds writes that “a careful review of the historical record has identified 161” provisions of law that prevent “some future piece of legislation from being filibustered on the floor of the Senate.” This includes legislation fast-tracking votes on trade negotiations, expediting votes on military base closures, and allowing Congress to bypass the filibuster for certain regulatory and budgetary matters.”
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“there are four broad ways that senators can weaken the filibuster without eliminating it altogether.”
“Make fewer bills subject to the filibuster”
“Reduce the power of individual rogue senators: The Senate could make it harder to initiate a filibuster. Right now, unanimous consent is required to hold a vote without invoking the time-consuming cloture process. But the rules could be changed to allow an immediate vote unless a larger bloc of senators — perhaps two or five or 10 — objected to such a vote, instead of just one.”
“Make it easier to break a filibuster”
“Reduce or eliminate the time it takes to invoke cloture: The Senate could reduce the amount of time necessary to invoke cloture and conduct a final vote. This could be done by allowing a swifter vote on a cloture petition, by reducing or eliminating the time devoted to post-closure debate, or both.”
“These days, Manchin couldn’t be in a better spot. His ally Chuck Schumer is now majority leader and Joe Biden is president after running as a uniter. They need his support on just about everything, and Manchin has spoken to Biden several times in the past week alone.”
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“Compared to most Democrats, Manchin is a fiscal conservative, often votes with the GOP on abortion legislation but has tried to cut deals on everything from immigration to gun background checks. He’s found more success lately on coronavirus aid than past endeavors, and is already pushing Biden’s package in a more moderate direction.
The Senate is already taking cues from Manchin, approving his amendment with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) 99-1. Manchin famously endorsed Collins in her 2020 battle for reelection, which burnished both of their bipartisan credentials.”
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“perhaps the most important major issue where Manchin will side with the GOP is on the minimum wage. He simply seems immovable on his opposition to a $15 national hourly rate.
“I would amend it to $11. You know that. Because I think that’s basically a base that we should have in America right now,” Manchin said, explaining that he would raise the wage up from $7.25 over two years. “It gets people who work 40 hours at least over the poverty guidelines. The states that have $15, already have it. That’s great.””