Sen. Joe Manchin's attempt at defending his intent to obstruct President Joe Biden's agenda ended up exposing his intellectual laziness. While defending the filibuster with platitudes and forced maverickiness, Manchin showed that he hasn't really bothered to learn the history of the filibuster or how Senate procedure works, and that he hasn't paid any attention to what his Republican colleagues have been doing and saying for the entire time he's been in the body.
Now we're seeing a darker side to Manchin's obstinance, one we've only seen glimpses of previously. He's been tossing the idea that he wants to include Republicans in voting rights legislation "to restore faith and trust in our democracy." That's skirting up next to the Big Lie, saying that there's validity in Republican distrust of an election that didn't end up with Trump back in office. His op-ed defending his stance moved him further right, when he talked not about voting rights, but "voting reforms," suggesting that he's more concerned with who is voting than making sure every eligible voter has free and fair access to the polls.
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"Our ultimate goal should be to restore bipartisan faith in our voting process by assuring all Americans that their votes will be counted, secured and protected," he wrote in that op-ed. And that, he says, is the lesson of Jan. 6. Spoiler: the lesson wasn't that Trump and his Republican followers in Congress would do anything to keep him in power. It was that we have to make sure Republicans trust elections again.
"January 6 changed me. I never thought in my life, I never read in history books to where our form of government had been attacked, at our seat of government, which is Washington, DC, at our Capitol, by our own people," Manchin told CNN. "So, something told me, 'Wait a minute. Pause. Hit the pause button.' Something's wrong. You can't have this many people split to where they want to go to war with each other."
Last month, Manchin told HuffPost "The only thing I would caution anybody and everybody about is that we had an insurrection on January 6, because of voting, right? And lack of trust in voting?”
Lack. Of. Trust. In. Voting. Not all the barriers and hurdles thrown in the way of voters who might just happen to be people of color and people more likely to vote for Democrats. "We should not, at all, attempt to do anything that would create more distrust and division." In other words, any voting "reform" he will support has to make Republicans happy.
Rep. Jim Clyburn, who has been righteously and rightly worked up about Manchin and his ego for weeks now, had a few things to say to Manchin about the other lessons that could be taken from Jan. 6.
"He said […] that Jan. 6th changed him," Clyburn said Friday on CNN. "Well, it changed me as well. I want to remind him of what some of those insurrectionists were saying to those African American law officers who were out there. One man talking about how many times he was called the N-word. I want to know, how does that man compromise in such a situation? How would he have me compromise in such a situation?"
No one yet has called Joe Manchin a racist, despite all of the evidence he is providing for us to reach that conclusion. Clyburn is coming pretty close there, justifiably so. There's a reason President Barack Obama, and many after him, call the filibuster a "Jim Crow relic."