2024-09-26 07:05:03
This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.
“Shame on her. She knows the filibuster is the Holy Grail of democracy.” —West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin to CNN on Tuesday, responding to Vice President Kamala Harris’ support for paring back the legislative filibuster
During an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio on Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris expressed her support for eliminating the filibuster—the Senate maneuver that effectively makes 60 votes the threshold for passing legislation, rather than a simple majority—when it comes to abortion rights.
“I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe,” she said in the interview, “and get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do.”
This didn’t strike me at first as especially newsworthy. Embedded in her central policy pledge of restoring Roe protections is the understanding that she would support the filibuster carve-out necessary to achieve that. This is not a subject on which there are 10 Republicans willing to deal, and it’s not the type of law that can be passed through reconciliation. It also does not meet the key newsworthiness benchmark of being “new.” Harris said in September 2022 that she “cannot wait to cast the deciding vote to break the filibuster on voting rights and reproductive rights.” That was a new position, in 2022. In 2017, she signed a letter with 60 of her fellow senators pledging to “any effort to curtail” the legislative filibuster. She, along with quite a few other Senate Democrats who signed the letter, indeed changed their tune when the circumstances changed, and are subject to criticism for that. But this isn’t a stance she arrived at yesterday while on the air with the good people of Wisconsin.
But since Harris does very few interviews, I guess this is as juicy as it gets. And so a proper rending of garments was had. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, an ardent defender of the legislative filibuster, said in a Wednesday speech, for example, that “to gamble the guardrails that make the Senate what it is, to short-circuit the process by which dissenting views are guaranteed a hearing, that ought to be disqualifying, by itself.”
The most deliciously over-the-top performance of anguish, however, came from West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin.
I’m not sure how to describe Manchin anymore. He was a conservative Democrat who switched his registration to independent earlier this year, but he still caucuses with Senate Democrats. There was a brief moment, hours after President Joe Biden announced he’d exit the presidential race in July, where word was that Manchin was thinking about re-registering as a Democrat to seek the Democratic presidential nomination. He didn’t. I’ve spent little to no time thinking about who Manchin would endorse in the presidential race, because I’m no longer required to think about Manchin. He is retiring at the end of the year.
Alas, though, Manchin made clear Tuesday that his support is certainly not going to Harris, now that she has reiterated her 2022 support for chipping away at the filibuster. Manchin has devoted much of his time during Biden’s presidency toward protecting the filibuster, so we understand why he’d snap into action when a presidential nominee raises the subject.
But these quotes to CNN are such a hoot!
“Shame on her,” he lamented. “She knows the filibuster is the Holy Grail of democracy.” Does she??
He continued: “I think that basically can destroy our country, and my country is more important to me than any one person or any one person’s ideology. … I think it’s the most horrible thing.”
Jesus! It’s a parliamentary quirk that has turned “51” into “60,” guy!
I mean, if you do believe that a comprehensive legislative filibuster is “the Holy Grail of democracy,” then it does follow that to pare it back, in any form, would be to “destroy our country.” But it could—could—be that his premise is a little over-the-top. (There are reasonable defenses of the filibuster—and then there’s a description of the filibuster as “the Holy Grail of democracy.”) Especially as there are significant democracy concerns with Harris’ opponent that he may want to consider in evaluating his choice.
But there is good news for Manchin, McConnell, and the rest of the filibusterists. First, Republicans are favored to win control of the Senate, so this all becomes moot. (Unless there’s unified Republican control of government, President Donald Trump again demands Republicans eliminate the legislative filibuster, and we see what would-be Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s spine is made of.) Second, it would not actually be up to a President Harris to curtail the filibuster. Democrats, if they kept control of the Senate with 50 votes, would have to get 100 percent of their caucus to go along with any change. Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema—also not a big fan of Harris’ comments!—were the two biggest impediments to filibuster reform during Biden’s presidency. In a Harris presidency, don’t be surprised to see a new stick-in-the-mud emerge.
