In an interview with Salena Zito for the Washington Examiner last week, Sen. Joe Manchin talked about the Senate as a “deliberative” body: The way we govern … the way the Founding Fathers set us up, was very unique. Nothing like it in the world. That’s why they called it the deliberate body. We were deliberating basically over the real hot topics that the House may send to us because whoever’s in control over there. They take a simple majority. … And that was not the intent and not the purpose of the Senate.”
This was his defense of the filibuster — the Senate rule that requires a 60-vote majority to pass legislation (budget bills can be passed by reconciliation, which only requires a simple majority). “Busting the filibuster under any conditions is wrong,” Manchin said, according to Politico, and he said much the same thing to other media outlets.
But then he showed such naivety — a genuinely shocking statement, given his years in politics — and said, first to Politico, “And I hope with that guarantee in place [Mitch McConnell] will work in a much more amicable way,” and then to the Washington Examiner, “But Mitch McConnell wouldn’t even agree to … the rules of how we were going to set up the committees until he felt that he knew that I wasn’t going to blow up the filibuster and ruin the institution.”
Manchin seems to credit himself with forcing the Senate back to bipartisanship, but all he has done is give McConnell back the power he lost when he became the Senate Minority Leader. McConnell prided himself on being the Senate’s “Grim Reaper.” As Majority Leader, he had the power to prevent bills passed in the House from ever seeing the light of day in the Senate — and he exercised that power often. In 2019 alone, McConnell left 250 House-passed bills to rot in his “legislation graveyard.” Only 105 laws were enacted in 2019, according to Roll Call, out of more than 8,000 bills and joint resolutions — the third lowest amount this millennium.
The threat to get rid of the filibuster was the greatest leverage Senate Democrats had to force McConnell to the table. After four years of McConnell holding the Legislative branch hostage, Democrats were finally going to have the opportunity to force the lead Republican in the Senate to compromise and to actually work across the aisle. Now, with Manchin’s guarantee to preserve the filibuster, McConnell once again has the power to halt legislation in its tracks.
We are truly stunned that Manchin could believe his promise will promote bipartisanship. With the filibuster in place, all McConnell and fellow Republicans have to do is dig in their heels on any and every piece of legislation proposed by Democrats to kill it — after all, we have yet to see 10 Republican senators willing to cross the party-line vote. But with the threat of killing the filibuster — and thereby forcing all votes to a simple majority — in their back pockets, Democrats would have had the negotiating power to encourage real bipartisanship.
Manchin did not preserve the Senate as a “deliberative” body with his vow to preserve the filibuster. All Manchin preserved was McConnell’s obstructionist body of the last four years.
Perhaps the Senate will prove us wrong; perhaps McConnell and Republicans will take a seat at the table and work across the aisle because of Manchin’s promise. But we doubt it.
