President Biden’s agenda and, with it, the electoral fortunes of Democrats hang in the balance. Both are being obstructed as two Democratic senators go freelancing.
Senator Joe Manchin has been West Virginia’s Secretary of State, Governor, and, since 2010, Senator. Given the state he represents, he necessarily is a centrist Democrat or even center-right. Frustrating as that may have been for progressives, his presence has meant, at least in the current senate, the difference between running committees and being runover by them. It also means he has leverage, enough that the temptation to use it must be awful.
Senator Kyrsten Sinema is … well … Senator Kyrsten Sinema. Sinema now finds herself with leverage, too, but without Manchin’s political and experiential bona fides.
The critical factor, here, is the context in which these two senators will use or misuse their leverage. Trump gets more unhinged with every rally and more desperate with every new revelation of his plot to overthrow our democracy. Republicans are studiously removing minorities from the electorate, gerrymandering themselves into control of the House, brazenly usurping the oversight of elections at the state level, and, in general, putting themselves in position to just declare a Republican the winner whenever the voters might chose differently. And both they and Trump are doing their best to incite violent uprisings as a backup plan.
Republican complicity, though, is not because they are cowards. They most certainly are, but that is beside the point. You don’t betray your country because you are afraid of being “primaried”. You don’t betray democracy because you are afraid of losing your job. You turn on and try to destroy the great American experiment because you value power more than anything and because you have the hubris to believe you should have absolute power. That makes you not a coward but a fascist. Given a little power, fascists will exercise it vigorously, viciously, and relentlessly to expand it until it is unlimited and unconditional. We are seeing exactly that behavior from Republicans at the local, state, and federal levels. We are seeing it in real time.
But with Republicans telling us who they are, what they are, and what they intend to do, with the survival of American democracy in the balance, Manchin has decided that the cost a bill is worth haggling over, even obstructing over, and even if tax revenues will pay for it. Sinema, meanwhile, has decided that … well … I don’t know what she has decided and there is little to indicate that she knows, either. But they both have decided that a reasonable response to this time of peril is to obstruct legislation that represents the best chance for Democrats to hold the Senate and the House, even though losing them could end our democracy. As an added bonus, they are delaying and clogging the legislative process at a time in which we need to move on election-integrity legislation with terrible urgency.
I doubt that Sinema knows all this, as I doubt that her obstructionism stems from a deeply held philosophy of governance. Manchin must know all this, just as he must have known how silly was his earlier pretense that bipartisanship was a reasonable expectation from a Republican Party that sees elections as impediments to their exercise of power. If this is a political calculation to win reelection in West Virginia, it is the most short-sighted calculation since Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich.
That is because, regardless of the final outcome, neither of these senators will get what they are after (including the one who might know what he is after). If the nation survives despite Manchin and Sinema, they will be thought of, if at all, as petty opportunists and treated as pariahs. If we lose our democracy, they will be thought of, if at all, as useful idiots in service of the anti-revolution and discarded.
In either event, they will be remembered by all as two individuals who were given the gift of being in the right place at the right time to stand up to American fascism but who turned their backs instead (probably because there was a mirror back there somewhere).