Democratic spoiler Sen. Joe Manchin is anxious to demonstrate his bona fides as a Republican whisperer. But Republicans are not so interested in helping him out, which is pretty much what anyone who has paid any attention to Republicans could see coming from a mile away.
Here’s a short recap of the past year in Manchin vs. democracy: Back in March 2021, the House passed the For the People Act, consisting of sweeping voting rights and elections reforms. There are 49 sponsors of that bill in the Senate—the two Independent senators and all the Democrats but one: Manchin. He was convinced—or at least said he was—that he could get “10 good” Republicans to help pass his own effort, the Freedom to Vote Act. He didn’t.
That led him abandon his own bill, with some help from fellow turncoat Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), and fall hook, line, and sinker for a Republican ploy to instead reform the Electoral Count Act (ECA). He justified abandoning his own bill, which it has to be said is a solid and important set of reforms, by blaming everything that happened in the 2020 election and after—including Jan. 6—on the vagaries of that 1877 law. The ECA, he now says “is what caused the problem.” It is of course not what caused the problem, and it’s not what’s exacerbating the problem more than a year later, with Trump still out there agitating about the Big Lie and a Republican Party which is quite literally redefining violent sedition as “legitimate political discourse.”
Here we are, nearly a year since the House Democrats passed the first bill to salvage our democracy, and after around half a dozen efforts by Senate Democrats to do the same filibustered by Republicans, with explicit approval from Manchin and Sinema. And here’s Manchin, saying that the “framework” for reforming the old law can be settled with Republicans as soon as this week.
Here’s what Republicans have to say to that: “Take a look at the length of time for the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Everybody thinks it’s going to get done in a week or two. But that took months.” That’s Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC). “We’re still weeks into a process of discovery and scoping. So, it wouldn’t surprise me if we’re looking at a May, June timeframe before we have a consensus work product.”
Of course that’s a ridiculous comparison. The ECA has just seven sections. It has one job: defining presidential electors and the congressional process of certifying their votes. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (the real name of the bill) has a dozen divisions, hundreds of titles within those divisions, and thousands of sections within those titles. It’s a massive, complex bill funding billions of dollars worth of investments. Tillis, who is supposedly working in a bipartisan way with Manchin and other Democrats, is clearly being obnoxiously disingenuous here, and he doesn’t give a damn.
Even if Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) is right when he says “You probably have to rewrite the whole thing. It’s written in a way that doesn’t make a lot of sense,” it’s not going to take months to accomplish. This is Republicans stringing out the process and pretending like they’re going to do something substantive and helpful on reforming the law. But they’re not really going to do that, and the supposed leader of this whole thing, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), admits it.
“Everything can be on the table, but in the end we’ve got to really focus on the Electoral Count Act and some issues like protecting poll workers from threats of physical violence and reauthorizing the Election Assistance Commission,” she told Politico. Everything is on the table except the things that might hurt Republicans’ election prospects, in other words. “There are some Republicans that want only to focus on the Electoral Count Act, period,” she said. Because the majority of Senate Republicans don’t want to protect elections workers from the threat of violence from right-wing extremists. Guess who wins in a 50/50 Senate with filibuster power?
Reforming this old law is absolutely essential, particularly since the Big Lie is fueling the Republican Party all the way from hyper-local to federal elections this year. And since it is so essential to the next elections, Republicans are really not going to let substantive reform happen.
Even if were they to allow a real reform of this law to occur, fixing the vagaries of it and making it much harder for Congress to overturn the will of the voters doesn’t fix the larger problem of securing free and fair elections. It can make sure that the process for Congress to count and certify electoral votes is uncorrupted, but it doesn’t do anything to ensure that the electoral votes they receive come from unsullied election processes, free from voter suppression and corrupt partisan local elections officials.
Trying to get ahead of whatever game Collins and Manchin are cooking up, Maine’s independent Sen. Angus King, Senate Rules Committee Chairwoman Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Senate Majority Whip and Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-IL) have provided their own framework in the Electoral Count Modernization Act. It would make it much harder for bad actors in Congress to overthrow a vote, but it would also prevent partisan bad actors in the states from hijacking the process.
The reality is, however, that Republicans aren’t going to let that happen—however much Joe Manchin capitulates to them. But they’ll drag this whole process out as long as they can before cutting him loose.
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