A Question for Joe Manchin
What's more important: protecting the filibuster or protecting democracy?
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If someone sent you this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up here.
Welcome to all the new subscribers who took advantage of this weekend’s 20% percent discount on new subscriptions. I noticed earlier that the deal is still on the site, so I’ll keep it in place until the end of the day.
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I’m still trying to decide if it’s better to do these talks at night or during the day. I’m deciding between lunchtime on Friday and Happy Hour on Thursday. Let me know what you prefer in the comments section.
Now on to the news.
Destroy Our Government, eh?
I hate to keep picking on Senator Joe Manchin, but it seems that the senior senator from West Virginia has an important question to answer: does he place a higher value on preserving the filibuster or preserving American democracy?
Last week, when asked if he’d be willing to scrap the filibuster to ensure passage of legislation creating a commission to investigate the events of January 6, Manchin replied, “I'm not willing to destroy our government, no.”
This quote has been ringing my head ever since this weekend when Democrats in the Texas State Legislature were able to, briefly, kill GOP-sponsored legislation that would have enacted some of the strictest voting laws in the country.
The legislation in Texas would:
Ban after-hours voting, drive-through voting, 24-hour voting, and require all weekday early voting to occur between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m - these prohibitions are a direct response to initiatives undertaken in predominately Democratic Harris County that led to record voter turnout in the 2020 election. In particular, a provision of the bill would limit voting on Sunday from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m is clearly aimed at limiting “souls to the polls” caravans, a traditional effort to take Black voters to vote after attending church.
Make it a felony for election officials to provide absentee ballot applications to voters who didn’t request them and even criminalize third-party groups that provide applications to voters.
Require voters requesting a mail-in ballot to print their driver's license number or Social Security number on both their applications and the envelope used to return their ballot. The bill would also toughen the rules on signature matching and err on the side of throwing out ballots.
Crackdown on volunteers who drive two or more non-family members to the polls.
Enact criminal penalties for election workers who interfere in the “free movement” of poll watchers in polling locations. This would practically give free reign for GOP poll watchers to disrupt the voting process.
Every one of these efforts will make it more difficult for people to vote and make it more harder for election officials to help people cast a ballot. Republicans argue that these measures are needed to restore trust in the election process and combat voter fraud. This is, of course, a lie. Voter fraud is non-existent, and the lack of confidence in the electoral process is the direct result of Republicans, including the former president, spreading lies about election security. There is a simple and obvious explanation for why Texas Republicans are enacting these measures: they want to make it harder for Democrats to vote, and in turn, harder for Democrats to win elections. They are using the Big Lie of the 2020 election to try and legitimize their efforts.
As if all these restrictive measures are not bad enough, the Texas legislation would also lower the evidentiary bar for proving electoral fraud from “clear and convincing evidence” to “a preponderance of the evidence.” This step would make it easier for judges to throw out electoral results in the state.
The provision follows a similar effort in Arizona. The state legislature there recently passed a bill stripping the secretary of State of responsibility for election litigation and giving it, instead, to the state attorney general. Coincidentally, Arizona’s current secretary of State is a Democrat, and the attorney general is a Republican.
Asking for Help
By walking out of the state legislature and denying Republicans a quorum, Democrats blocked the bill from passing. But it’s only a temporary roadblock. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has said he will call a special legislative session to push the bill past the finish line (he’s also threatened to veto legislation that ensure lawmakers get paid, as a punishment for the Democratic walkout). Now those same Democrats are begging the national party to do something to stop the GOP’s onslaught on voting rights.
They are demanding that the Democratic-controlled Senate pass the For People Act, which would create national standards for administering elections, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would put teeth back in the Voting Rights Act and give the federal government more power to prevent state-led efforts to racially discriminate against voters.
As Texas state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer told the Washington Post, “Breaking quorum is about the equivalent of crawling on our knees begging the president and the United States Congress to give us the For the People Act and give us the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.” State Rep. James Talarico put the issue in even more straightforward terms, “State lawmakers are holding the line. Federal lawmakers need to get their shit together and pass the For The People Act.”
They are getting a hand from 100 democracy scholars who put out a letter this week arguing that “our entire democracy is now at risk” and urging Congress “to do whatever is necessary—including suspending the filibuster—in order to pass national voting and election administration standards that both guarantee the vote to all Americans equally, and prevent state legislatures from manipulating the rules in order to manufacture the result they want.”
The battle lines in this fight could not be clearer: Republicans are intent on doing everything they can, at the state level, to pass legislation that would limit voting rights and ensure a GOP advantage in elections. At the federal level, Senate Republicans are blocking every Democratic effort to undo these efforts to disenfranchise voters, particularly those of color.
Democrats in the House have passed voting rights legislation, but it’s now up to the Senate.
Manchin Agonistes
Manchin and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema have both said that they would not support scrapping the Senate filibuster, making passage of the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act impossible. There is zero chance that ten Senate Republicans would join with Democrats to break a GOP-led filibuster of these two pieces of legislation.
By holding firm to their pro-filibuster position Manchin and Sinema are aiding and abetting the GOP’s assault on American democracy. To, in the words of Manchin, not “destroy our government,” they are actively helping Republicans restrict voting rights on a massive scale and potentially lay the groundwork to contest free and fair election results when Democrats win statewide races.
More than four months after the inauguration of Joe Biden - and the departure of Donald Trump - it’s more apparent than ever that the Republican Party is the greatest threat to American democracy and the future of the republic. And that threat is greater than perhaps any time since the Civil War. Republicans are working to subvert electoral rules, disenfranchise millions of voters, spread bogus conspiracy theories, sow even more distrust in the electoral system, and potentially steal elections. The enactment of legislation restricting voting rights in Georgia, Florida, Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, Kentucky, Montana, and Arizona and the aborted effort in Texas along with the continued refusal of congressional Republicans to accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election makes clear the GOP’s agenda. They can’t win election fairly so they are changing the rules to win them unfairly. How could anyone care more about the filibuster than stopping this degradation of American democracy?
As the letter above from 100 scholars makes clear, “Our democracy is fundamentally at stake. History will judge what we do at this moment.” And let’s be clear: the “we” is not a collective one: it’s Manchin and Sinema.
What’s Going On?
Francis Fukuyama is very concerned about the future of American democracy.
North Macedonia elected its first Jewish lawmaker … you will absolutely, positively guess what happened next.
Good piece in the Washington Post on the downside of calls to defund the police.
Jonathan Chait has a smart take on the Texas voting rights bill.
I’m not going to lie - I’m pretty excited to read the Pentagon’s UFO report.
Musical Interlude/This Day In History
Fifty-four years ago today, the Beatles released “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” The album is not the Beatles best record (it’s argubaly not even in the top three - in my opinion, “Revolver,” “Abbey Road,” and “The White Album” are ahead of it). However, it’s one of the most influential records in rock ‘n roll history and it does contain the best song the Beatles ever recorded.
Here’s Joe Cocker performing the second best cut on the record, “With a Little Help From My Friends”
Here’s a snippet of Jimi Hendrix doing “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band …. three days after the album’s release and with Paul McCartney in attendance.
… and for good measure Paul McCartney performing “Foxy Lady.”
Agree on your ranking of Beatle albums, but I'd include "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - reprise" on the best songs on the album; transition from that to "A Day In The Life" was very good.