Manchin and Sinema are not the enemy

The words catch in my throat, but it’s time for Democrats to lay off the Senators from West Virginia and Arizona.  All we ever hear on MSNBC is Manchin this and Sinema that. We almost never hear about the 50 Republican Senators who stand united against the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act that will be debated and voted on this week.  They aren’t named and shamed the way our two recalcitrant Democrats are. Also ignored in most of the political coverage are the 203 Republican members of the House who voted against it last Thursday.  Hell, the whole Republican Party stands in opposition to the bill.  Those Republicans are the enemy, not Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema who we can be angry at for not signing on to suspending the filibuster, but at least they support the bill itself and are pledged to vote for it if it comes up for a vote.

All 50 Republican Senators have announced their opposition to the combined Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act.  Forty-nine Republican Senators already voted to filibuster the John R. Lewis Act when it came up for a vote by itself in November. Later it was attached to the Freedom to Vote Act and introduced as the revised legislation in the Senate after its passage in the House.  That’s where we stand today.  The bill has passed the House and will be debated in the Senate tomorrow and voted on later in the week.  Everyone knows it’s an entirely proforma exercise because Republicans will filibuster it.

But rather than just complaining about Manchin and Sinema, think about it this way:  if ten Republican Senators would vote for cloture on the voting rights bill, it would come to a vote and pass.  I’m not suggesting this as some sort of pie-in-the-sky scenario.  There are 11 Republicans in the Senate today who were also serving when the Voting Rights Act, the original bill that passed in 1965, came up for reauthorization in 2006.  All 11 of them participated in a unanimous vote to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act, arguably the most important piece of legislation passed in the 20th Century.  

The reauthorization was considered to be an unremarkable vote at the time.  Even Mitch McConnell of Kentucky got up in the Senate and gave a speech in favor of reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act, proudly telling a rather long story about how as a law student he had been in the Rotunda of the Capitol in 1965 when President Johnson signed the bill into law.  He went on to note that “we have renewed the Voting Rights Act periodically, and on a bipartisan basis, year after year after year, because members of congress know that this is a piece of legislation that has worked, and one of my favorite sayings that many of us use from time to time is that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.  This is a good piece of legislation that has served an important purpose over many, many years.”

What has happened since 2006?  Well, the Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, eviscerated the provision under Section Five of the Voting Rights Act called “pre-clearance,” which mandated that any Southern state contemplating changing its voting laws had to “pre-clear” the changes with the Department of Justice. Last year, in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the Supreme Court severely weakened Section Two of the Voting Rights Act making it harder for plaintiffs to prove racial discrimination in voting laws.

So the law that every Republican in the United States Senate voted to renew in 2006, including 11 Republicans still serving in the Senate, was significantly weakened in ways that the John R. Lewis Act would have corrected.  And yet 10 of the 11 voted to filibuster the bill when it came up for a vote last November.

Why?  What explains this?  Two things:  racism and a lust for power.  Since the election of Donald Trump racism has not only been A-okay in the Republican Party, it has been a good part of that party’s reason for being.  After the Supreme Court decision in 2013, Republican-controlled states across the south almost immediately instituted changes to their voting laws that made it harder for minorities to vote, including requirements for voter ID’s like driver’s licenses which many Black and Latino voters did not have.  But that’s just fine with McConnell and the rest of them because the changes in the voting laws around the country have made it easier for Republicans to win.

Here are the Republicans who voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act in 2006, but voted to filibuster the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act in November of 2021:

John Cornyn of Texas

John Thune of South Dakota

Lindsey Graham of South Carolina

James Inhofe of Oklahoma

Richard Burr of North Carolina

Susan Collins of Maine

Mitch McConnell of Kentucky

Chuck Grassley of Iowa

Mike Crapo of Idaho

Richard Shelby of Alabama

There they are, 10 Republicans who could vote for cloture when the Freedom to Vote:  John R. Lewis Act comes up for a vote this week.  They could then turn around and vote against it when the time for an up or down vote on the bill arises.  In that case, because both Manchin and Sinema have announced that they support the bill, it would pass with Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote.

You want enemies, there they are, along with the 40 other Republicans in the Senate who will vote to filibuster the bill.  Manchin and Sinema may be frustrating Democratic efforts to pass the bill by refusing to suspend the filibuster, but at least they support the bill itself.

It would help if either of them was more likeable and reasonable, but they’re not.  They may be assholes, but they’re our assholes, and they’ve been there for votes on judges and Biden’s appointments to his Cabinet and lesser officials needing Senate Confirmation, and they will be there if something comes to pass that will allow Biden to make an appointment to the Supreme Court.

So let’s stop trashing our own, folks, and dig in for the fight that is coming for both the House and the Senate.  We need every member of the House and Senate we can get, and right now, Manchin and Sinema are two of them, and I say give it a rest at least for now.