Senator Joe Manchin has the opportunity to make himself a hero for millions and a villain to radical Democrats who seek to permanently transform America into a socialist one-party state.
All he has to do: “Kill” the filbuster.
It is the one Senate rules obstacle preventing a flood of radical changes to the nation’s politics. It requires 60 members to end debate on most topics and move to a vote; whereas the Senate has a 50-50 split with Kamala Harris holding the deciding vote as President of the Senate.
The H.R. 1 anti-election-integrity bill. Amnesty for illegal aliens. Climate change policies that gut America’s energy policies. All of these now hang in the balance based on one Democratic senator’s decision whether or not to open the floodgates.
Manchin’s response to the hordes of howling leftists demanding that he dispense with the time-honored Senate practice? Under “no circumstance.”
“I have said it before and will say it again to remove any shred of doubt: There is no circumstance in which I will vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster,” Manchin recently wrote in the Washington Post. “The time has come to end these political games, and to usher a new era of bipartisanship where we find common ground on the major policy debates facing our nation.”
Bi-partisanship? Now is not the time for cooler heads to prevail, according to the radical Democrats hellbent on ramming through their policies, unlawful or not. The left-wing activist army has thus unleashed the dogs of war on Manchin. (On Twitter, of course.)
“Joe Manchin is a national disgrace,” one blogger tweeted. “How can we allow one guy from West Virginia to wield so much power?” another moaned. “The filibuster is about maintaining white minority rule,” the ‘anti-racist’ W. Kamua Bell claimed. “And Joe Manchin wants to make sure that he is the white minority who gets to rule.”
The left is breaking out every epithet, every accusation in its bag of tricks, every pressure tactic to force Manchin to bend the knee. But he may not be alone in his show of resistance to disposing with the filibuster (and not just leaving the “talking filibuster.”) Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema on Tuesday defended the filbuster as well.
“When you have a place that’s broken and not working, and many would say that’s the Senate today, I don’t think the solution is to erode the rules,” Senator Sinema said in an interview after two Phoenix events. “I think the solution is for senators to change their behavior and begin to work together, which is what the country wants us to do.”
There is a reason that Joe Manchin can be independent of the radical left, which infuriates the activists. He doesn’t need them. An article at Blue Tent lays out succinctly why.
“Naturally, progressives and leftists despise Manchin. In West Virginia, he’s held in low regard by activists who remember slights like his endorsement of a Republican in the 1996 gubernatorial race after he lost the Democratic primary to Charlotte Pritt, a more liberal figure who was backed by unions,” the article explains. “An attempt to primary Manchin from the left in 2018 flopped badly, leaving progressive West Virginians with no choice but to vote for him in the general.”
Senator Manchin indeed holds all the leverage; he has a base of support in West Virginia that is independent from the Democratic Party’s progressive wing. If there is anything radical leftists hates, it is a member of the Democratic Party that doesn’t march in lockstep with them off a cliff.
Both Manchin and Sinema have now put themselves in the crosshairs of radical activists. It remains to be seen whether the senators will have the intestinal fortitude to withstand the non-stop caterwauling from the progressive left and its mainstream media cohorts.
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OPINION: This article contains commentary which reflects the author's opinion.