Democracy Weeps

Last night, Democrats failed to change the Senate filibuster rules in order to pass protections for voting rights.  The effort was doomed from the start, but Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer wanted to put senators on the record as either for or against voting rights.  Who's for democracy and who isn't?

Sen. Joe Manchin, the Democratic holdout who tanked the legislation along with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, argued that it was more important to preserve the Senate filibuster rules than to preserve the great American experiment in democracy.  During his speech, he displayed a placard that read, "The United States Senate has NEVER been able to end debate with a simple majority."  This is simply untrue.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar has pointed out that there are 160 individual exceptions to the filibuster rule. Things have been changed whenever it benefited the interests of Republicans. Somehow it only took 51 votes to put the Trump tax cuts into place.  And the Bush tax cuts for that matter. Somehow it only took 51 votes to appoint Amy Boney Carrot to the Supreme Court. Somehow it only took 51 votes to try to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or to pass the National Gas Policy Act of 1977, the Endangered Species Act of 1995, and a change to the reconciliation process in 1996. 

But when it comes to voting rights, suddenly everyone on the Republican side of the aisle is hugging the filibuster tight, despite knowing that so many times in history, including just last month with the debt ceiling, changes have been made to allow passage with less than 60 votes. 

Manchin seems to taking a cue from the Trump playbook and perpetuating his own version of The Big Lie.  Say "never" enough times, capitalizing it when you do, and eventually people will come to believe your revisionist version and forget not only history but current events.

Joe Manchin - don't believe his lies.