When they bring up the voting rights bill in the U.S. Senate, we know what will happen in the end. Sinema and Manchin will side with the Senate Republicans to kill it with a filibuster. It will be necessary to get Sinema and Manchin on the record as siding with the forces of autocracy. After Sinema and Manchin betray democracy with a recorded vote, President Biden and the Democrats will have to make a choice on what to do with Sinema and Manchin. Will President Biden make the charge stick to those two that they are “siding with Jefferson Davis, George Wallace, and Bull Conner?”
And it will come down to that folks.
Yes, we need to shine the spotlight on the fascist in the Senate who empower Manchin and Sinema. It’s a necessary political argument to make. I think calling the Senate Republicans a bunch of autocrats will be hard enough for President Biden and Senate Democrats to do. Deep down, a number of Senate Democrats just want to think that the Senate is like that great social club they think it is. And President Biden championed that he could heal our political divisions and work with Republicans to move our country forward.
But you cannot heal political divisions and move forward with a disloyal political party that is trying to overthrow our democracy.
And Sinema and Manchin will have to be lumped into this group. It requires the Democrats to make the argument that we really only have 48 Senate Democrats. Therefore, Democrats do not control one of the branches of government that passes bills.
And here is the problem. I can already hear the screams for those who want us to continue to play nice and appease Sinema and Manchin. If Democrats state that Sinema and Manchin do not believe in democracy, they will simply bolt to the Republican side! And all will be lost!
I remind you that Sinema and Manchin are already working with the Republicans. Please don’t give me anymore about Biden getting his judges through. With a Supreme Court in the hands of a reactionary partisan Republican supermajority, any of the lower court judges can only do so much. Look at what the Supreme Court did today with the OSHA vaccine mandate.
We will lose abortion right this year, and it looks like the SCOTUS is going to kill any regulations on greenhouse gases as well. And anyone think that those reactionary Republicans on the SCOTUS will suddenly retire or drop dead this year? There is only so much lower court judges can do with a reactionary SCOTUS ready to throw us back to the 19th Century.
And let’s be real folks, unless Biden and the Democrats have not used some super secret political weapon to force Sinema and Manchin to change the filibuster, neither Sinema nor Manchin will change their minds. As Aldous Pennyfarthing pointed out today, Sinema wants to challenge Biden for the presidency in 2024. And I think Biden knows this. Remember, even Biden has implied that Sinema thinks she is president, along with Joe Manchin.
Why else did Sinema disrespect President Biden before and during that Senate Caucus meeting today? Even Norm Ornstein, who has not wanted to criticize Sinema, said that she “gave the middle finger” to President Biden both with the timing of her announcement and her behavior during the causus meeting.
And Manchin did the same damn thing with BBB. He went on FOX to announce his decision to kill BBB. It was a public betrayal of Manchin’s word to Biden.
Both are hell bent for leather to destroy Biden’s Presidency.
To be honest, I have never seen this type of political behavior before from U.S. Senators from the same political party doing everything they can to smash their party’s agenda. But I am 58 years old. The only other time was during the 1960’s with civil and voting rights, and I was too young to see or remember that.
And that may be part of the problem. I think Joe Biden and Senate Democrats do not have the experience of seeing such antidemocratic behavior in the flesh from their own members. Look at all the comments that have been leaking to the press about how perfidious Sinema and Manchin have been.
It will be hard for President Biden and the Democrats do to, but they must denounce and condemn Sinema and Manchin. And they must repeatedly say that. Being super nice to those two has gotten us nowhere on some large parts of President Biden’s Agenda. And their actions are threating our democracy.
Will it force them out of the Democratic Party? Probably. I say the odds are high. According to Lawrence O’Donnell, Biden and Schumer did not want to move on voting rights earlier “because they knew it would alienate” both Sinema and Manchin. And they wanted to get some of their agenda passed before that happened.
Think about that. We got a few things done, but some of the most important items of the Biden Agenda like PROTECING THE RIGHT TO VOTE WOULD “ALIENATE” TWO CORRUPT SENATORS! SO CALLED DEMOCRATIC SENATORS WOULD BE ALIENATED IF PEOPLE HAD ACCESS TO VOTING BALLOTS!
ALIENATED?????!!!!!
How about alienating Democratic voters!
Even Ornstein, O’Donnell, and Eugene Robinson declared that Sinema and Manchin must be put on the record on voting rights. They should not get a walk with, “I support voting rights, but I support the filibuster!” And all agreed that Republicans need to be condemned for their opposition as well.
If Sinema and Manchin are called out and switch parties, voters will have to be given CLEAR choices this fall. Sinema and Manchin muddy those choices with their false designation of “Democratic Senators.” If they are not called out for aiding and abetting Republicans, voters will simply see a dysfunctional U.S. Senate as “Democrats in Disarray.” And they will see President Joe Biden as a loser who cannot do what he promised in 2020.
This is a recipe for absolute political disaster in the 2022 Midterm Elections.
I have seen this movie before in 1994 and 2010. When Democrats were seen as holding the House, Senate, and White House, conservative Democrats would side with Republicans who stuck together in their opposition to Clinton and Obama. Any Democratic agenda item had to be watered down or eviserated to appease conservative Democrats. Health care never saw the light of day with Clinton, and I distinctly remember the conservative Democrats claiming we needed NO stimulus under Clinton. The conservative Democrats ran the same play book against Obama.
The winners in the 1994 and 2010 Midterms were the Republicans.
I do not say any of this lightly. I’m a partisan Democrat. And calling out Sinema and Manchin as siding with fascists is a high risk political strategy. And it will probably fail in the midterms. But Sinema and Manchin along with the Republicans have placed our democracy in jeopardy. If Biden and the Democrats do not stand up for our democracy by clearly identifying the enemies of voting rights, I can guarantee that we will lose all in the midterms.
Friday, Jan 14, 2022 · 5:41:21 AM +00:00
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Merlin196357
Here are some of the reactions of Senate Democrats and Biden Staffers to Sinema’s stunt today:
As a result, Biden and party leaders continued upping the ante in an unwinnable fight, even pausing consideration of the rest of the party’s (probably similarly doomed) domestic agenda—the Build Back Better Act—to consider voting reforms this January.
The voting rights road to nowhere will likely conclude next week with a failed vote on the Senate floor and, eventually, a debate over changing Senate rules that will feature impassioned speeches but, almost certainly, few meaningful results.
This knowledge seems to be sinking in: Democrats exited their Thursday meeting with Biden at a loss for what might happen next. Asked by The Daily Beast what, at this stage, could shake up Democrats’ stalled dynamic on voting legislation, Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) paused a beat.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”
Sinema’s speech—timed to maximize its effect—particularly stung Democrats from Capitol Hill to the White House.
Most Senate Democrats declined to engage much with their Arizona colleague’s move. “I think it just speaks for itself,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT). “I can't really say more.”
— one person familiar with the internal White House response to the Arizona senator’s remarks
The White House did not immediately respond to questions about Sinema’s remarks, although one longtime Biden advisor messaged The Daily Beast roughly halfway through her remarks that the president was likely “spitting bullets” over the perceived disrespect of delivering a speech torpedoing his agenda only minutes before he was set to address the caucus.
“Just colossally disrespectful,” the longtime advisor said. “It’s a middle finger, and it’s frankly unimaginable to someone who spent four decades in the Senate.”
Although White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that she would not “get into any private conversations” between Biden and Sinema, those on the staff level were blindsided by the Arizona senator’s remarks until they were first reported on Twitter.
Within the West Wing, the collapse of Biden’s push for filibuster reform came amidst a torrent of bad news, including a Supreme Court decision striking down his nationwide vaccine and testing mandate for large businesses. One person familiar with the internal response to the Arizona senator’s remarks only sent a red-faced swearing emoji; another summed it up as “ughhhhhhhhhhh” with eleven H’s.
Emphasis is mine.
If you take some of what the Democratic Senators have to say about Sinema at face value, there is no Plan B. This means they 1) have no political weapon to strike back at Sinema and Manchin or 2) they simply cannot see themselves doing any type of “ditry tricks” to get those two traitors to democracy to change their minds. In other words, maybe they just lack the imagination to strike back at those two.
I’m not sure if I should be slightly relieved to hear that President Biden is pissed off at these two. At least if Biden gets angry with all the insults from these two, he might be willing to punish or hurt them. And if that punishment is only public condemnation from the President and the rest of the Democrats, at least that is something. My main fear is that Democrats will continue to play the game that Sinema and Manchin want. And for those two, it looks like you are being “reasonable,” but you are really just stringing along all the other Democrats for a months on end just to say, “NO!” Translation: continue the dance of bad faith negotiations forever.
With that second outcome, Sinema and Manchin keep attacking the Biden and Democratic Agenda from inside the caucus, with the assist from the Republicans. I’m not sure the Republicans want to have Sinema and Manchin switch parties when they help set Democrats up like Lucy does to Charlie Brown with that damn football.