It occurs to me that if either Manchin or Synema were more effective leaders or politicians, they would get together with moderates on the Republican side, create a "gang" and actually get things done. But unfortunately they also seem to be more interested in grand standing and self-aggrandizing than actually making positive change.
“ Republicans are folding here," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the ranking member of the Budget Committee, said in a rare criticism of McConnell. "This is a complete capitulation."
"The argument made yesterday was that this may be more pressure than two Democrat senators can stand regarding changing the filibuster rules," Graham said. "That to me is not a very good reason."
Somehow the narrative that Manchin and Sinema were not willing at all persisted…
I’ve been saying for months most pundits and activist had the narrative backwards…Manchin and Sinema weren’t completely stringing them along with no chance of reform….they were essentially threatening McConnell and caucus with a “nice filibuster you have here, would be a shame if something happened to it…” to get every bit if cooperation we saw along the way.
Seems pretty clear Schumer knew this, as after the first debt ceiling deal he basically put Republicans on blast as cowards and dared them to hold out again in December of 2021. But again, even sooner this time, McConnell caved…and Manchin and Sinema shelved the idea of “fixing the filibuster to save it” yet again. The real tragedy here for Democrats is that Manchin wanted so little from Republicans for those threats and that McConnell or the Senators behind him weren't dumb enough to really push the debt ceiling brinkmanship until sweeping filibuster reforms were all that remained feasible with a pissed off Manchin / Sinema...
Going into the last few weeks, it seemed like Democrats were clearly overplaying their hand with Manchin / Sinema if the goal was to get them to cave…especially with Republicans saying they are open to ECA reform…but if you ask me, the goal of this week was never to actually get rid of filibuster (think everyone knew hearts and minds wouldn’t change), but ultimately to offload as much blame as possible from Biden and "The Democrats" onto "Manchin & Sinema" (which maybe Manchin and Schumer are fine with if it it means he is more likely to get reelected!)
Sinema's calculus I understand a LOT less, frankly...
So true. Your writing is so fantastic, but I can't help wonder if you could reach a wider audience if you were still writing for VOX or somewhere like that. More people need your perspective! You need to get articles like this published in The Atlantic or something.
Isn’t the larger risk than Congress overturning election results is the risk that gerrymandered Republican state legislatures will simply ignore votes for Democrats and just select Republican electors? Is there going to be bipartisan support for preventing that?
“A cloud has been hanging over American politics ever since.”
The cloud has been hanging over American politics since the billionaire boys club acquired the corporate media and joined with Democrats to push a fake Trump-Russia collusion story while supporting “We Will Resist” protests that grew and devolved into violent riots.
“Republicans are making life harder and less convenient out of a mistaken belief that this gives them a partisan advantage.”
This statement proves to me that the stater does not really understand Republicans and should probably should talk to people that do before writing opinions about their motives. Haidt covered the REAL motivation of conservatives vs liberals. Conservatives own a moral diet that includes sanctity: sanctity of law, sanctity of process, etc. Liberals only fire on their own internal perceptions of fairness and harm. So conservatives are more constrained in their politics; while liberals can justify almost any political position that they can claim solves some perspective of fairness or harm… even if untrue. Conservatives will not tolerate a single invalid ballot no matter the marks; while liberals don’t tolerate a single missed vote that supports their righteous crusade to achieve the (unattainable) utopian future of zero unfairness and harm.
“And I sincerely do not understand why the White House and Joe Manchin cannot reach some deal there that involves a sum that is higher than $0 and lower than $1.7 trillion.”
Because the BBB bill is the Great Reset bill and it includes all manner of radical leftist BS that isn’t at all with building. Cut that crap out and Republicans will talk. However, that crap is the primary interest of the Democrats and the Klaus Schwab globalist that own and run the party.
I think the Democrats shouldn't mind if their Voting Rights stuff does not pass. It gives them an easy sour grapes excuse for the future to explain why they lose an election and why the winner is illegitimate. See Stacy Abrams for an example.
1 - There is no version of BBB that Manchin would author. He doesn't want to do it AT ALL. He's willing to vote for it on his terms, but his repeated stated preference is NOTHING. That's why you can't force him to write the version that CAN pass. His version is a blank piece of paper.
2 - It's true that GOP voting restrictions do not have the partisan effects they expect. That conventional wisdom is false. But that doesn't mean the GOP is going to stop trying to come up with restrictions that will. Federal legislation is needed to prevent that, not just cure current problems.
3 - The GOP was fairly blatantly trying to peel off moderates and provide political cover to Manchin and Sinema by floating ECA reform. It was a trap. The VRA will be dead by the end of the week regardless. The danger to the GOP will be over, and if their ECA reform proposals are genuine (I'm still skeptical) they'll be genuine next week. If they don't negotiate in good faith on ECA going forward, it was never real in the first place.
So, here’s a voter suppression theory - on net let’s suppose there’s no partisan advantage, but say the groups harmed are minorities, college students, and non college white voters. To the Democrats this is bad, racial justice is clearly important and college students are demographically/politically close to staffers. But for elite Republicans, shifting the coalition away from non college whites is a win. It’s a way of moving the electorate in line with their preferences beyond the partisan advantage they believe it has.
the definition of a material imperfection could be in the eyes of the beholder and if the beholder is someone recruited by Steve Bannon, do you think the rule would be applied evenly?
“The way forward here is to turn the temperature *way* down and have some people sit in a quiet room with experts and work out a list of things that everyone can agree [on]” is The Truth for pretty much everything.
Yeah “experts” was the only part of that quote that left me with a little heartburn. It would be nice to use “unbiased sources of information” instead but they don’t really exist 🤷🏻♀️
I have to admit I have not focused on the ins and outs of specific state-level actions that have been taking place recently, but my broad sense is that a lot of states passed emergency measures in 2020 to allow easier voting access in the face of COVID, and then in 2021 followed up with new measures rolling back a lot of these to something closer to the pre-COVID baseline. Democrats broadly have treated these 2021 laws as a fundamental attack on the right to vote which in most (all?) cases seem way overblown, but I'm wondering if there is a good resource somewhere that tracks how specific voting rules have changed across states over time. Regardless of the merits of specific registration, voter ID, drop box, etc rules, the idea that we are seeing Jim Crow 2.0 or that Kyrsten Sinema = Bull Connor is totally self-discrediting to anyone living in the real world.
Bouncing on some of the comments I saw, I don't think it's just about Progressives vs. Centrists. I think it's establishment vs. Twitter.
The establishment really seems scared to be called bad names on Twitter. Am I correct here? Because, if I am, I can't quite comprehend it. Don't they know Twitter is at best a few tens of thousand of people i.e. nothing in the scope of the US population?
Just do the right fucking thing and if the Twitter mob doesn't like it and think you're just an agent of the white supremacy on par with Hitler for compromising either with the Centrists or with the Republicans on some key topics then screw them. And don't be afraid of being seen telling them to go screw themselves. Trump proved that voters aren't allergic to displays of backbone in pursuit of something your electors generally like (or will trust you on).
The issue is that the Twitter mob *can be* a very active force in primaries, and the left-of-center interest/issue groups all live on twitter, and the staffers and campaign workers for a lot of elected Democrats live on Twitter.
I like to say/think/remember that "Twitter is not real life", but in the context of politics Twitter is a larger part of real life than it "should" be.
The best counter to this was Biden and the Hyde amendment. Something he was in support of his entire political career, but had to abandon due to his staff revolting on the issue. You can try to ignore twitter views, but if your peers and staff care about the views expressed there then you will end up caring as well.
What gets said on Twitter gets amplified, though, so it doesn't stay there. Those 10k people are the "taste makers" for millions of people in politics and journalism.
The problem is that the establishment is on Twitter and they are subject to the availability heuristic too. The 10,000 people on Twitter look like a vast majority when you spend your life on Twitter yourself.
So... yeah. But, like, are we meant to believe that US congresspeople are so uneducated and stupid (esp. on the D side) that they wouldn't know about the availability heuristic and so spineless/headless as to being unable to counteract it?
I mean, it's fairly easy for me. I barely use Twitter and my feed doesn't seem to have many people involved in pile-ups or controversies. And if they do get in hot water (Kevin Drum or Freddie deBoer sometimes do), I don't have the time to follow...
Still, I don't think it's that hard... Hence why I find the whole thing so surprising.
All of the journalists and hill staffers and campaign workers and advocacy groups live on Twitter though, so Twitter ends up playing a very outsized role in politics.
I honestly have no idea what Dem leadership has been doing lately. They seem to be delighting in making members walk the plank just to show donors/activists/extremely online people that they "care".
The debt limit process was a debacle. They knew they were never getting Republican votes for a clean increase and instead made everyone vote multiple times to increase it, seemingly just so Republicans can run ads decrying that "Bob voted 15 times to raise the debt ceiling. Vote Republican and restore fiscal sanity." Then once they got the workaround rather than extend it out past Biden's first term, they just did it to get past the midterms. So they ensured they'll do the whole song and dance again only probably from they minority.
I have no idea what they hope to accomplish by forcing a vote on the filibuster other than pissing off the only Dem who is going to win in WV for the foreseeable future. I suspect there are also other Dems that don't want to get rid of the filibuster and have been happy to let Manchin and Sinema take the heat for them and don't want to have to go on the record.
But mostly if you are going to force a vote on the filibuster it needed to be immediately after they got the majority not over halfway through the term when they are going to lose the majority in a few months. At least then there would have been some upside.
I think Dems are basically in a bad spot where all the hill staffers and campaign people and advocacy groups are getting angry and basically preparing to turn on them. The only way to deal with that is maybe to make a very public showing of trying to fulfill their requests (a big compliant that certain people like to make is that Dems don't "fight" hard enough").
So doing all this bizarre dramatic stuff is certainly going to piss off Manchin, but it might also be staving off a disastrous midterm where the right, the center, *and* the left decide they want change.
Is there really much evidence though that huge numbers of people are going to “turn” on Democrats this midterm? I mean there’s always an amount of non participation and switching to the other party which is why the President’s party does poorly. I just don’t think there are signs that it’s out of the ordinary at this time.
I also don’t see how making a big show about something you know is going to fail is helpful for keeping people fired up. It’s far more likely to make them more discouraged and resentful than letting it die in peace.
Finally, if these people really believe that it’ll be the end of democracy if Democrats don’t pass this bill, I find the logic that then they are going up sit out the next election to ensure Republicans come to power to be more than a bit of a stretch.
"I find the logic that then they are going up sit out the next election to ensure Republicans come to power to be more than a bit of a stretch"
I never said that those people were going to be logical.
And having the bill die in peace might in fact be what those groups would actually prefer, but they've all convinced themselves either that bullying Manchin will work or that they want to see the Dems go down swinging fighting for the bills.
Yeah, I’m not sure how ECA reform is a “trap” when it’s not like any other voting reform is really on the table at this point. Though, I suppose if we don’t reform the ECA, VP Harris can throw out the electoral ballots in 2024 and declare Biden president again! Many reputable lawyers, such as Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, agree!
It occurs to me that if either Manchin or Synema were more effective leaders or politicians, they would get together with moderates on the Republican side, create a "gang" and actually get things done. But unfortunately they also seem to be more interested in grand standing and self-aggrandizing than actually making positive change.
Lindsey Graham basically laid it all out for everyone in October for NBC News:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/republicans-say-mcconnell-blinked-debt-ceiling-save-filibuster-n1281112
“ Republicans are folding here," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the ranking member of the Budget Committee, said in a rare criticism of McConnell. "This is a complete capitulation."
"The argument made yesterday was that this may be more pressure than two Democrat senators can stand regarding changing the filibuster rules," Graham said. "That to me is not a very good reason."
Somehow the narrative that Manchin and Sinema were not willing at all persisted…
I’ve been saying for months most pundits and activist had the narrative backwards…Manchin and Sinema weren’t completely stringing them along with no chance of reform….they were essentially threatening McConnell and caucus with a “nice filibuster you have here, would be a shame if something happened to it…” to get every bit if cooperation we saw along the way.
Seems pretty clear Schumer knew this, as after the first debt ceiling deal he basically put Republicans on blast as cowards and dared them to hold out again in December of 2021. But again, even sooner this time, McConnell caved…and Manchin and Sinema shelved the idea of “fixing the filibuster to save it” yet again. The real tragedy here for Democrats is that Manchin wanted so little from Republicans for those threats and that McConnell or the Senators behind him weren't dumb enough to really push the debt ceiling brinkmanship until sweeping filibuster reforms were all that remained feasible with a pissed off Manchin / Sinema...
Going into the last few weeks, it seemed like Democrats were clearly overplaying their hand with Manchin / Sinema if the goal was to get them to cave…especially with Republicans saying they are open to ECA reform…but if you ask me, the goal of this week was never to actually get rid of filibuster (think everyone knew hearts and minds wouldn’t change), but ultimately to offload as much blame as possible from Biden and "The Democrats" onto "Manchin & Sinema" (which maybe Manchin and Schumer are fine with if it it means he is more likely to get reelected!)
Sinema's calculus I understand a LOT less, frankly...
So true. Your writing is so fantastic, but I can't help wonder if you could reach a wider audience if you were still writing for VOX or somewhere like that. More people need your perspective! You need to get articles like this published in The Atlantic or something.
Isn’t the larger risk than Congress overturning election results is the risk that gerrymandered Republican state legislatures will simply ignore votes for Democrats and just select Republican electors? Is there going to be bipartisan support for preventing that?
isn't the trap that they will do what they've done before, negotiate endlessly without actually ending up passing anything?
Sorry, I'm out of the loop on this issue -- what are the two proposed laws (ECA and FTV)? What would they do?
“A cloud has been hanging over American politics ever since.”
The cloud has been hanging over American politics since the billionaire boys club acquired the corporate media and joined with Democrats to push a fake Trump-Russia collusion story while supporting “We Will Resist” protests that grew and devolved into violent riots.
“Republicans are making life harder and less convenient out of a mistaken belief that this gives them a partisan advantage.”
This statement proves to me that the stater does not really understand Republicans and should probably should talk to people that do before writing opinions about their motives. Haidt covered the REAL motivation of conservatives vs liberals. Conservatives own a moral diet that includes sanctity: sanctity of law, sanctity of process, etc. Liberals only fire on their own internal perceptions of fairness and harm. So conservatives are more constrained in their politics; while liberals can justify almost any political position that they can claim solves some perspective of fairness or harm… even if untrue. Conservatives will not tolerate a single invalid ballot no matter the marks; while liberals don’t tolerate a single missed vote that supports their righteous crusade to achieve the (unattainable) utopian future of zero unfairness and harm.
“And I sincerely do not understand why the White House and Joe Manchin cannot reach some deal there that involves a sum that is higher than $0 and lower than $1.7 trillion.”
Because the BBB bill is the Great Reset bill and it includes all manner of radical leftist BS that isn’t at all with building. Cut that crap out and Republicans will talk. However, that crap is the primary interest of the Democrats and the Klaus Schwab globalist that own and run the party.
I think the Democrats shouldn't mind if their Voting Rights stuff does not pass. It gives them an easy sour grapes excuse for the future to explain why they lose an election and why the winner is illegitimate. See Stacy Abrams for an example.
1 - There is no version of BBB that Manchin would author. He doesn't want to do it AT ALL. He's willing to vote for it on his terms, but his repeated stated preference is NOTHING. That's why you can't force him to write the version that CAN pass. His version is a blank piece of paper.
2 - It's true that GOP voting restrictions do not have the partisan effects they expect. That conventional wisdom is false. But that doesn't mean the GOP is going to stop trying to come up with restrictions that will. Federal legislation is needed to prevent that, not just cure current problems.
3 - The GOP was fairly blatantly trying to peel off moderates and provide political cover to Manchin and Sinema by floating ECA reform. It was a trap. The VRA will be dead by the end of the week regardless. The danger to the GOP will be over, and if their ECA reform proposals are genuine (I'm still skeptical) they'll be genuine next week. If they don't negotiate in good faith on ECA going forward, it was never real in the first place.
So, here’s a voter suppression theory - on net let’s suppose there’s no partisan advantage, but say the groups harmed are minorities, college students, and non college white voters. To the Democrats this is bad, racial justice is clearly important and college students are demographically/politically close to staffers. But for elite Republicans, shifting the coalition away from non college whites is a win. It’s a way of moving the electorate in line with their preferences beyond the partisan advantage they believe it has.
the definition of a material imperfection could be in the eyes of the beholder and if the beholder is someone recruited by Steve Bannon, do you think the rule would be applied evenly?
“The way forward here is to turn the temperature *way* down and have some people sit in a quiet room with experts and work out a list of things that everyone can agree [on]” is The Truth for pretty much everything.
Yeah “experts” was the only part of that quote that left me with a little heartburn. It would be nice to use “unbiased sources of information” instead but they don’t really exist 🤷🏻♀️
I have to admit I have not focused on the ins and outs of specific state-level actions that have been taking place recently, but my broad sense is that a lot of states passed emergency measures in 2020 to allow easier voting access in the face of COVID, and then in 2021 followed up with new measures rolling back a lot of these to something closer to the pre-COVID baseline. Democrats broadly have treated these 2021 laws as a fundamental attack on the right to vote which in most (all?) cases seem way overblown, but I'm wondering if there is a good resource somewhere that tracks how specific voting rules have changed across states over time. Regardless of the merits of specific registration, voter ID, drop box, etc rules, the idea that we are seeing Jim Crow 2.0 or that Kyrsten Sinema = Bull Connor is totally self-discrediting to anyone living in the real world.
Bouncing on some of the comments I saw, I don't think it's just about Progressives vs. Centrists. I think it's establishment vs. Twitter.
The establishment really seems scared to be called bad names on Twitter. Am I correct here? Because, if I am, I can't quite comprehend it. Don't they know Twitter is at best a few tens of thousand of people i.e. nothing in the scope of the US population?
Just do the right fucking thing and if the Twitter mob doesn't like it and think you're just an agent of the white supremacy on par with Hitler for compromising either with the Centrists or with the Republicans on some key topics then screw them. And don't be afraid of being seen telling them to go screw themselves. Trump proved that voters aren't allergic to displays of backbone in pursuit of something your electors generally like (or will trust you on).
The issue is that the Twitter mob *can be* a very active force in primaries, and the left-of-center interest/issue groups all live on twitter, and the staffers and campaign workers for a lot of elected Democrats live on Twitter.
I like to say/think/remember that "Twitter is not real life", but in the context of politics Twitter is a larger part of real life than it "should" be.
The best counter to this was Biden and the Hyde amendment. Something he was in support of his entire political career, but had to abandon due to his staff revolting on the issue. You can try to ignore twitter views, but if your peers and staff care about the views expressed there then you will end up caring as well.
What gets said on Twitter gets amplified, though, so it doesn't stay there. Those 10k people are the "taste makers" for millions of people in politics and journalism.
And even those millions are barely relevant to the voting public at large. Virtually no one is as interested in politics as us guys.
Which I always found surprising in a way. Why bother voting if you never bother educating yourself about the political issues... but here we are.
I think its more that hard money donations are worried about being called names on Twitter for supporting candidates Twitter dislikes.
Fair point. That could be that.
Maybe we should turn off Twitter. As in: stop using it.
The problem is that the establishment is on Twitter and they are subject to the availability heuristic too. The 10,000 people on Twitter look like a vast majority when you spend your life on Twitter yourself.
So... yeah. But, like, are we meant to believe that US congresspeople are so uneducated and stupid (esp. on the D side) that they wouldn't know about the availability heuristic and so spineless/headless as to being unable to counteract it?
I mean, it's fairly easy for me. I barely use Twitter and my feed doesn't seem to have many people involved in pile-ups or controversies. And if they do get in hot water (Kevin Drum or Freddie deBoer sometimes do), I don't have the time to follow...
Still, I don't think it's that hard... Hence why I find the whole thing so surprising.
All of the journalists and hill staffers and campaign workers and advocacy groups live on Twitter though, so Twitter ends up playing a very outsized role in politics.
And when those 10,000 people on Twitter make up most of the journalism in the country …
And no one pays attention to journalists anymore anyhow (except for R voters and Fox News). So ignore the whole lot.
I honestly have no idea what Dem leadership has been doing lately. They seem to be delighting in making members walk the plank just to show donors/activists/extremely online people that they "care".
The debt limit process was a debacle. They knew they were never getting Republican votes for a clean increase and instead made everyone vote multiple times to increase it, seemingly just so Republicans can run ads decrying that "Bob voted 15 times to raise the debt ceiling. Vote Republican and restore fiscal sanity." Then once they got the workaround rather than extend it out past Biden's first term, they just did it to get past the midterms. So they ensured they'll do the whole song and dance again only probably from they minority.
I have no idea what they hope to accomplish by forcing a vote on the filibuster other than pissing off the only Dem who is going to win in WV for the foreseeable future. I suspect there are also other Dems that don't want to get rid of the filibuster and have been happy to let Manchin and Sinema take the heat for them and don't want to have to go on the record.
But mostly if you are going to force a vote on the filibuster it needed to be immediately after they got the majority not over halfway through the term when they are going to lose the majority in a few months. At least then there would have been some upside.
I think Dems are basically in a bad spot where all the hill staffers and campaign people and advocacy groups are getting angry and basically preparing to turn on them. The only way to deal with that is maybe to make a very public showing of trying to fulfill their requests (a big compliant that certain people like to make is that Dems don't "fight" hard enough").
So doing all this bizarre dramatic stuff is certainly going to piss off Manchin, but it might also be staving off a disastrous midterm where the right, the center, *and* the left decide they want change.
Is there really much evidence though that huge numbers of people are going to “turn” on Democrats this midterm? I mean there’s always an amount of non participation and switching to the other party which is why the President’s party does poorly. I just don’t think there are signs that it’s out of the ordinary at this time.
I also don’t see how making a big show about something you know is going to fail is helpful for keeping people fired up. It’s far more likely to make them more discouraged and resentful than letting it die in peace.
Finally, if these people really believe that it’ll be the end of democracy if Democrats don’t pass this bill, I find the logic that then they are going up sit out the next election to ensure Republicans come to power to be more than a bit of a stretch.
"I find the logic that then they are going up sit out the next election to ensure Republicans come to power to be more than a bit of a stretch"
I never said that those people were going to be logical.
And having the bill die in peace might in fact be what those groups would actually prefer, but they've all convinced themselves either that bullying Manchin will work or that they want to see the Dems go down swinging fighting for the bills.
None of this is any good at all, but here we are.
Yeah, I’m not sure how ECA reform is a “trap” when it’s not like any other voting reform is really on the table at this point. Though, I suppose if we don’t reform the ECA, VP Harris can throw out the electoral ballots in 2024 and declare Biden president again! Many reputable lawyers, such as Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, agree!