When Joe Manchin Will Kill the Filibuster
The West Virginia senator will betray his constituents in order to pass his ‘voting rights’ bill.
by David Catron
September 30, 2021, 12:07 AM
This week’s Beltway brawls over infrastructure, the Biden fiscal agenda and the federal debt ceiling, for all their sound and fury, are merely preliminary legislative bouts. The main event of the 117th Congress will be the epic fight over “voting rights.” The Democrats know their congressional majorities are unlikely to survive next year’s midterms unless both houses pass one of three controversial bills — the For the People Act, the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, or the Freedom to Vote Act. Deceptively benign titles notwithstanding, each of these bills arrogate to the federal government powers reserved to the states by the Constitution.
The first two were passed by the House but were DOA in the Senate. The Freedom to Vote Act, however, is a Senate bill (S.2747) and it is co-sponsored by Sen. Manchin. When the current budget battles are over, the Democrats will send S.2747 to the Senate floor for a vote. It will fail to garner 60 votes, whereupon Manchin will claim GOP intransigence “forced” him to break his pledge to preserve the filibuster. Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, the only other Democratic senator overtly opposed to killing the filibuster, will by then be so damaged by the abuse to which she is now being subjected over Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending bill that she will immediately cave and begin reciting the obligatory talking points:
In the face of state-level threats that undercut the fundamental right to vote for millions of Americans, we must act now to protect our democracy. Our bill would set commonsense minimum standards to ensure that no state infringes upon its citizen’s right to vote and confront widespread anti-democratic practices such as partisan gerrymandering and dark money spending. Free, fair and open elections are the backbone of our national commitment to government of the people, by the people, and for the people – and through this legislation, we will do our part to pass this experiment in self-government on to the next generation of Americans.
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https://spectator.org/joe-manchin-kill-filibuster/
