The damage done by Joe Manchin is likely to get much worse

The damage done by Joe Manchin is likely to get much worse

Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.). (Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters)

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By Greg Sargent

Columnist

Today at 11:26 a.m. EST

Something important just happened in Washington, but it created little more than a passing media ripple. The House passed a far-reaching political reform package late Thursday, but because it’s simply assumed that Republicans will filibuster it, this is a second-tier story.

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Which provides an occasion to consider anew the damage that Sen. Joe Manchin III’s opposition to seriously reforming or ending the filibuster threatens to inflict over time. It won’t just constrain passage of the Democratic agenda. It could also constrain efforts to protect and reform our political system and institutions at a moment of generational urgency.

The window for a once-in-a-generation set of political reforms, such as those implemented after Watergate, is rapidly closing. It’s not clear when it will open again.

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We should not count out the West Virginia Democrat. To his credit, he seems to be seriously engaging on these issues. But if this moment is lost, it could leave our system vulnerable in a way that it arguably was not in the years after Watergate.

Manchin is reportedly in discussions with GOP senators about small filibuster reforms. These probably include things like making it harder for one senator to inflict paralysis via filibuster-by-emailed press release.

That’s good, but this only goes so far. Because Manchin knows the filibuster is rendering the Senate dysfunctional. And Manchin spent many months trying to build GOP support for reasonable voting rights protections, to no avail.

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So Manchin knows Republicans will never, ever support anything remotely meaningful in protecting democracy. Yet he remains the public face of the idea that democracy reform must be done only in a bipartisan fashion, or not at all.

Yes, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) is also a holdout, as are a few other moderates. But get Manchin, and the others would surely follow.

Without Manchin, the possibility of a filibuster suspension to protect democracy with Democrat-only legislation is off the table, putting us in an impossible bind.

What will the long-term damage be?

The reform package passed by the House illustrates the point. Championed by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), it would strengthen congressional oversight of communications between the White House and the Justice Department, making presidential manipulation of law enforcement harder.

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The Protecting Our Democracy Act would expedite court review of efforts to stonewall congressional subpoenas, and curb abuses of presidential pardon and emergency powers, among many other things.

Donald Trump exploited all of those problems. He tried to corrupt the Justice Department into manufacturing a pretext for overturning the 2020 election. After using court delays to stall oversight of himself, Trump and his insurrection co-conspirators are doing this again to stymie an accounting into it.

This new bill would address those problems. Democrats hope to get it through the Senate by breaking it up and seeing what Republicans will support. A few pieces might pass. But how many?

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Meanwhile, the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 will likely turn up new evidence fleshing out Trump’s plot to exploit holes in the Electoral Count Act (ECA), which governs how Congress counts presidential electors. That will strengthen the case for reform.

But it’s hard to see ECA reform surviving a GOP filibuster. Making this worse, Trump loyalists are busy running for positions that would enable them to attempt a similar scheme again.

There’s also the For the People Act. It would safeguard against state-level election subversion (which could facilitate a similar future coup attempt), make it harder to restrict voting and ban partisan gerrymandering.

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Will the filibuster kill all these reforms?

Watergate then, Trumpism now

After Watergate revealed a host of weaknesses in our system, Congress did act. This time, as Trump and his antidemocratic, authoritarian movement continue to reveal many glaring new weaknesses, we might not.

“When the Watergate scandals occurred, Congress passed a whole series of reforms that addressed the fundamental problems that were revealed,” Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21, told me.

And now?

“We had an insurrection on Jan. 6,” Wertheimer said. “We have voter suppression laws enacted all over the country. We have efforts going on to set the stage for partisan officials to rig the outcome of federal elections.”

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“The problems here that have to be corrected go much deeper than the problems that existed after Watergate,” Wertheimer said.

Another layer of perversity

Because GOP opposition to these reforms is a quasi-certainty, and because the filibuster is treated as a natural and immovable force, the fact that they will go nowhere is assumed to be baked in as an unalterable condition of our politics.

That means the media doesn’t treat House passage of such things, or the reason they’re not passing, as big news. Which means voters don’t learn what they’re missing out on, and why.

As press critic Jay Rosen points out to me, it’s “realistic” for the media to downplay these proposals, in that they have little chance of passage. But, Rosen adds, it would also be “realistic” to tell voters that the failure to act poses a threat to “representative democracy.”

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“Which realism wins in Washington journalism?” Rosen asks, rhetorically. The former one does. And voters don’t know what’s being lost, or why it’s so dangerous to our democratic future.

Manchin knows democracy must be protected. Manchin knows no Republicans will participate in that endeavor. Yet Manchin still believes protecting democracy must be bipartisan by definition.

It’s unclear how we break out of this endless doom loop. But the damage could prove much worse than we know.