'Shame on Her' - Longtime Senator Refuses to Back Kamala, Slams Her Over Radical Plan to Pass Abortion Rights
Sen. Joe Manchin — who was likely to be the last Democrat to represent West Virginia for a long while before turning independent earlier this year — announced he would not be supporting Vice President Kamala Harris over her threat to nuke the filibuster.
This came in spite of the senator indicating he was anticipating announcing his support earlier this month, CNN reported.
What changed? Well, Harris’ comments in an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio earlier this week in which she signaled her willingness to do away with the filibuster to pass legislation that would codify abortion rights into federal law.
“I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe,” Harris said in an interview which aired Tuesday morning.
“And get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do.”
This was Harris’ position back in 2019 when she ran for president and had a brief moment in the spotlight before her support cratered. While part of that was due to the fact that she was dismantled on a debate stage over her personal drug use vs. her harsh sentences for drug criminals as a prosecutor by former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, another Democratic candidate, there was also a general consensus that she was too far to the left to win in the general election.
Handily, the deus ex machina of the vice presidency saved her campaign, particularly after Joe Biden’s camp agreed that it should pick a black woman and she turned out to be the most qualified of the candidates they vetted.
Now that she’s running atop the ticket, most of her left-flank positions have changed, so one might be forgiven if they assumed she’d changed about nuking the filibuster, too.
However, talk of doing away with needing 60 votes to move forward with any provision aside from judicial nominees — that exception dating back to the Barack Obama years, when the president decided what he really needed was a pliant Congress for a few bench seats, only to start a practice that handed Donald Trump three conservative justices on the Supreme Court with virtually no Democratic support — is apparently back on the table. Which means Manchin’s endorsement of Harris is off the table.
“Shame on her,” said Manchin, who is retiring and is almost certain to be replaced by a Republican.
“She knows the filibuster is the Holy Grail of democracy. It’s the only thing that keeps us talking and working together. If she gets rid of that, then this would be the House on steroids,” he explained.
So, as for an endorsement: “That ain’t going to happen,” he said. “I think that basically can destroy our country, and my country is more important to me than any one person or any one person’s ideology. … I think it’s the most horrible thing.”
Part of the equation, most likely, has to do with Harris’ 2019 positions on energy — something that would deeply affect Manchin’s home state of West Virginia.
“Well, she said she supported banning fracking too, and she changed that. I was hoping she would change this,” Manchin said in announcing he wouldn’t move forward with an endorsement.
However, part of it is the fact that ending the filibuster would, essentially, turn the Senate into a rubber stamp for whatever party controls bare majorities in both chambers of Congress as well as the White House. The Supreme Court and lower courts may stand in their way, at least temporarily — but then again, “court reform” (read: court-packing) has also been on the Democrats’ agenda, so it’s just a matter of time before that impediment is done away with should there be a bare majority.
And yet, two of the four independents who caucus with the Democrats — the centrist-leaning ones leaving the Senate at this congress’ end, Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — have criticized Harris for her decision to abandon the filibuster on Roe precisely because within it lies the seeds of the ability to make an abortion ban permanent.
“To state the supremely obvious, eliminating the filibuster to codify Roe v. Wade also enables a future Congress to ban all abortion nationwide,” Sinema said on social media.
To state the supremely obvious, eliminating the filibuster to codify Roe v Wade also enables a future Congress to ban all abortion nationwide.
What an absolutely terrible, shortsighted idea. https://t.co/ldzTB9BkV7
— Kyrsten Sinema (@kyrstensinema) September 24, 2024
And, as for one of the candidates to replace Mitch McConnell as the lead Republican in the Senate, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota said the Democrats were “willing to change the filibuster over a whole range of issues.
“That’s the problem,” Thune said, adding that the other party has a laundry list of items they want to “pass at 51 votes in the Senate, which undermines not only the Senate but the country which is designed to protect minority rights. Once they do it there, they will do it on everything.”
Thune said that he wouldn’t change the filibuster if he were to become majority leader and Trump were to get into office. But once it’s gone, it’s gone. That should have been the lesson Democrats learned after Obama’s shortsightedness on judicial nominations. Are they really going to be so foolish as to think that it won’t come back and bite them for a second time?
Apparently so. If Joe Manchin leaves any legacy in the upper chamber, it will be as a Cassandra for the party that he split from earlier this year (he registered as an Independent in May): The end of the filibuster means the end of the Senate as we know it, and that’s bad news for both America in the short-term and the Democrats in the long haul.
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