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      Manchin ‘very reluctant’ on electric cars in ominous sign for Biden’s climate fight

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      Manchin ‘very reluctant’ on electric cars in ominous sign for Biden’s climate fight Centrist Democrat, who holds key swing vote in US Senate, has poured scorn on the idea of phasing out gasoline and diesel carsFaced with rising gasoline prices, many Americans are now looking to switch to an electric car. But the shift away from fossil fuel vehicles has been criticized by Senator Joe Manchin, who has said he is “very reluctant” to see the proliferation of battery-powered cars.There has been a surge in interest in buying electric vehicles (EVs) in the wake of the war in Ukraine, analysts say, with drivers in the US unnerved by gasoline prices that have surpassed $4.30 a gallon as a result of the conflict and the supply chain issues from the pandemic.‘A really bad deal’: Michigan awards GM $1bn in incentives for new electric carsRead moreJoe Biden has repeatedly championed the growth of the nascent EV market as a way to tackle the climate crisis, with America’s heavy dependency on polluting cars a major source of planet-heating emissions.But Manchin, the centrist Democrat who holds a key swing vote in the US Senate, has poured scorn on the idea of phasing out gasoline and diesel cars.“I’m very reluctant to go down the path of electric vehicles,” Manchin said at the energy conference CERAWeek, held in Houston. “I’m old enough to remember standing in line in 1974 trying to buy gas – I remember those days. I don’t want to have to be standing in line waiting for a battery for my vehicle, because we’re now dependent on a foreign supply chain, mostly China.”Manchin, who has taken more money in political donations from fossil fuel interests than any other senator, also said he has “a hard time understanding” why the federal government would invest in a network of electric car charging stations, as the Biden administration aims to do.“I’ve read history, and I remember Henry Ford inventing the Model-T, but I sure as hell don’t remember the US government building filling stations,” Manchin said to applause. “The market did that.”The West Virginia senator’s criticism is ominous for the White House’s hopes of passing major climate legislation this year. The climate elements of the Build Back Better Act, which Manchin’s opposition has so far stalled, included half a trillion dollars in clean energy tax credits as well as major rebates for electric car purchases to drive up their adoption.Manchin’s comments also come amid renewed consumer interest in EVs reported by car dealers as some Americans look to bypass the volatility of the global oil market altogether. The past month has seen a strong increase in the number of people searching online for hybrid and battery electric vehicles, according to Edmunds, a car shopping and industry analyst website.This is a continuation of the broader growth of EVs in recent years “but the major surge in interest of late is certainly more of a reaction to record gas prices sparked by the war in Ukraine”, according to Jessica Caldwell, executive director of insights at Edmunds.“Anecdotally we are hearing a lot about a greater interest in EVs because of what is going on in Ukraine, but the real test is whether that will last,” said Ed Kim, president of AutoPacific, an auto industry research firm.Kim said that gas-powered cars built in the US are already full of foreign-made parts. “Joe Manchin represents West Virginia which is dependent upon coal so I believe he has a vested interest in downplaying clean energy,” Kim said.“Look at what’s happening right now, we are seeing fuel prices we haven’t seen in years because of geopolitical issues. Any measures we take to reduce our reliance on petroleum is good for our economy, our environment and to ensure the country doesn’t come screeching to a halt.”Previous jumps in the price of gasoline, such as in 2008, saw a corresponding increase in sales of battery-powered and hybrid cars and analysts expect a similar spike as a result of the current crisis. Around half a million electric cars were sold in the US last year, up more than 80% on 2020, with consumers attracted to a slew of new models such Ford’s Mustang Mach-E and the Telsa Model Y.While traditional car makers such as Ford and GM are now making significant investments in the EV market, demand is now regularly outstripping pandemic-hit supply, meaning the ballooning interest in going electric may end in frustration. “Unfortunately, making an EV purchase is not particularly easy to do right now amid inventory shortages,” said Caldwell.Owning an electric car is far cheaper than a gas-powered one due to a lower cost of fuel and fewer mechanical problems but the up-front cost of most EVs is typically more than $40,000.This means they are often out of reach for many low-income Americans who are already forced, due to the car-centric design of US cities and suburbia, to spend a large amount of their money on running a vehicle to go to work and complete other routine trips.The Biden administration is aiming for 50% of new car sales to be electric by 2030 – last year the total share was around 3% – and industry experts say that major investments will need to be made to hit this target.“Dependence on oil is funding some of the most brutal regimes in the world today. There’s nothing to suggest any component of an EV would resemble the current national security, environmental and humanitarian cost of oil.” said Nick Nigro, founder of Atlas Public Policy.“The transition to EVs is inevitable at this point – the timeline is up to consumers and policymakers. The events in Ukraine are a reminder how volatile and destructive a dependence on oil is and that should only accelerate this timeline.”TopicsClimate crisisElectric, hybrid and low-emission carsJoe ManchinJoe BidenUS politicsDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      Billionaire Republican backer donates to Manchin after he killed key Biden bill

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      Billionaire Republican backer donates to Manchin after he killed key Biden billHome Depot co-founder Ken Langone, author of I Love Capitalism!, said of the Democratic senator: ‘Thank God for Joe Manchin’ A billionaire Republican donor and Trump supporter donated the maximum allowed amount to Joe Manchin after the West Virginia Democrat sank Joe Biden’s signature domestic spending plan.The Build Back Better plan sought to boost health and social care, and to help combat the climate crisis, at a price tag of $1.75tn.‘He’s a villain’: Joe Manchin attracts global anger over climate crisisRead moreManchin, one of two key swing votes in the 50-50 Senate, used a Fox News Sunday interview in December to say he was finally a “no” on the legislation.The move appeared to surprise Biden, and enraged progressives, but Ken Langone was presumably delighted.The co-founder of Home Depot and author of a 2018 book called I Love Capitalism! had signaled his support for Manchin before the senator made his move on Build Back Better.“I don’t see leadership any place in this country. Thank God for Joe Manchin,” Langone told CNBC in November. “I’m going to have one of the biggest fundraisers I’ve ever had for him. He’s special. He’s precious. He’s a great American.”Manchin voted for Biden’s earlier Covid relief and stimulus package, as well as for a bipartisan infrastructure bill, but helped to water down both.In December, shortly after Manchin torpedoed Biden’s flagship legislation, Langone and his wife each gave $5,000 to Manchin’s Country Roads political action committee, CNBC reported. The amount is the most any individual can give in a year.CNBC also listed donations from major corporations that helped Country Roads raise more than $150,000 more in December than it did in November.Manchin is next up for re-election in 2024. As the only Democrat in a high office in West Virginia, he holds outsized power in the evenly divided Senate – a position that would change if Republicans take back the chamber in November.Langone has contributed to Democrats but predominantly supports Republicans. He backed Trump in 2016, and continued to support him throughout Trump’s tenure in the White House, though he chided him over the Capitol riot.CNBC reported that Langone has recently made much larger donations than to Manchin, including $1m to a fund that works to defeat Democratic senators and half a million dollars to Americans for Prosperity Action, a group backed by the hard-right Koch family.In his book I Love Capitalism!, Langone writes of his fear of socialism in the US, a fear stoked by the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders’s run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.Some young Americans, Langone says, think the US “should be headed toward something that, in my mind, resembles socialism: guaranteed income. Free college tuition. Single-payer healthcare.“I disagree. Strongly.”He also writes that he disagrees “not (as you might believe) because I’m a rich guy trying to hold on to my money. I disagree because socialism is based on the false notion that we should all be exactly equal in every single way.”Neither Langone nor Manchin immediately responded to requests for comment.TopicsJoe ManchinUS political financingUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      ‘He’s a villain’: Joe Manchin attracts global anger over climate crisis

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      The West Virginia senator’s name is reviled on the streets of Bangladesh and other countries facing climate disaster as he blocks Biden’s effort to curb planet-heating gasesby Oliver MilmanWithin the brutal machinations of US politics, Joe Manchin has been elevated to a status of supreme decision-maker, the man who could make or break Joe Biden’s presidency.Internationally, however, the Democratic senator’s new fame has been received with puzzlement and growing bitterness, as countries already ravaged by the climate crisis brace themselves for the US – history’s largest ever emitter of planet-heating gases – again failing to pass major climate legislation.Joe Manchin: who gave you authority to decide the fate of the planet? | Daniel SherrellRead moreFor six months, Manchin has refused to support a sweeping bill to lower emissions, stymieing its progress in an evenly split US Senate where Republicans uniformly oppose climate action. Failure to pass the Build Back Better Act risks wounding Biden politically but the ramifications reverberate far beyond Washington, particularly in developing countries increasingly at the mercy of disastrous climate change.“He’s a villain, he’s a threat to the globe,” said Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, based in Bangladesh. “If you talk to the average citizen in Dhaka, they will know who Joe Manchin is. The level of knowledge of American politics here is absolutely amazing, we know about the filibuster and the Senate and so on.“What the Americans do or don’t do on climate will impact the world and it’s incredible that this one coal lobbyist is holding things up. It will cause very bad consequences for us in Bangladesh, unfortunately.”The often tortuous negotiations between Manchin, the White House and Democratic leaders appeared doomed on 19 December when the West Virginia senator said he could not support the $1.75tn bill, citing concerns over inflation and the national debt. The latest twist caused anguish to those who see their futures being decided by a previously obscure politician located thousands of miles away.“I’ve been following the situation closely,” said Tina Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, a low-lying Pacific nation that risks being wiped out by rising sea levels. “We have to halve emissions in this decade and can’t do it without strong, immediate action by the US.”Stege said the Marshall Islands was already suffering the impacts of the climate crisis and if the US doesn’t slash its emissions “the outcomes for countries like mine are unthinkable.”Even America’s closest allies have looked on in dismay as a single lawmaker from Biden’s own party has stalled what would be the biggest – and arguably first – piece of climate legislation in the US’s plodding, and often rancorous, history of dealing with escalating global heating.“Biden has done a fair bit in very challenging circumstances [but] in Canada we look on with bewilderment because it’s such a different political context. It’s very bizarre,” said Catherine McKenna, who was environment minister in Justin Trudeau’s government that introduced carbon pricing in 2019. “Politics is hard but I don’t think anyone has given up. We just really hope they are able to get a deal.”McKenna said she was vilified by some Canadian provincial premiers who “fought to the death” against carbon pricing but that there was now broader support for climate action across the country, including within industry, than in the US. “It’s unfortunate that it’s just one person that is holding up something that’s so critically important,” she said of Manchin.“Joe Manchin is a problem, and I think he needs to be called out,” said Ed Davey, a British MP who was previously the UK’s secretary of state for energy and climate change. “It’s in the US interest, in the interest of West Virginia and elsewhere, to take advantage of green zero-carbon technology, which is the future.”Davey, who is now leader of the Liberal Democrats, warned that the US risks ceding leadership in clean energy to China if it doesn’t act. “People will end up paying higher prices, jobs will go and not be created, the security of America will be reduced, Beijing will be laughing,” he said, adding that Manchin was in effect “working on behalf of the Chinese government” by not supporting the transition away from fossil fuels.China used last year’s Cop26 climate talks in Scotland to “insidiously point out to every country that US just can’t implement”, said Rachel Kyte, an expert in international affairs at Tufts University and a climate adviser to the UN secretary general. Kyte said many governments believe Biden is well-meaning but cannot follow through on his commitments, a frustration compounded by a lack of American action on related areas, such as climate finance for poorer countries.“There’s almost a resentment that the US just can’t deliver,” she added. “There’s this sinking feeling about the politics of America. You can’t turn your back on the US because it’s still the biggest economy, but what are countries supposed to do?”Much of this angst is now being channeled towards Manchin.After more than a decade in national politics, the 74-year-old senator has suddenly garnered a level of infamy far beyond his fiefdom of West Virginia, where the centrist Democrat has served as governor and senator while reaping millions of dollars through his personal investments and campaign contributions from a coal industry that continues to loom large in his state. It’s a situation that has caused bafflement overseas.“Who is Manchin, the Dem senator from West Virginia who betrayed Biden?” La Repubblica in Italy has demanded. Clarín, a newspaper in Argentina, has called Manchin a “rebelde” and a “tycoon with ties to the mining structure of West Virginia, the other Virginia of the USA”. Helsingin Sanomat, a Danish newspaper, also noted Manchin’s links to the fossil fuel industry and lamented that he has “disagreed with the most ambitious climate action” put forward by the US.The negotiations with Manchin involve stakes far greater than any normal political maneuvering in Washington. The world is already being strafed by wildfires, heatwaves, floods and societal instability wrought by the climate crisis and rising temperatures are on track to breach limits set by governments in the Paris climate accords, a situation that would push some parts of the world beyond human livability.Salvaging this situation will be virtually impossible without swift action by the US, the world’s second largest carbon polluter and a major oil and gas exporter. Analysts say the half a trillion dollars of support for renewable energy and electric cars in the Build Back Better bill would give the US a decent chance of cutting its emissions in half this decade, which Biden and scientists say is imperative to avoid climate breakdown.But Manchin’s opposition has already ensured the removal of a key element of the bill, a plan to force utilities to phase in clean energy over time, and the prospect of him joining Republicans to block the overall package has seen him come under intense criticism within the US.Climate activists have confronted Manchin in Washington and kayaked to his yacht to remonstrate with him. Some fellow Democrats say he has “failed the American people”. Even the Sunday Gazette, the local paper of Charleston, West Virginia, has run a headline of ‘We need this so bad’, in reference to the bill.All this has been to little effect, although Manchin did say earlier this month there could still be agreement on “the climate thing”, offering some vague hope to activists while not quite quelling their anger. “Senator Manchin is a fossil-fueled sociopath on a Maserati joyride while he lets the world burn,” said Janet Redman, climate campaign director at Greenpeace USA. “At the end of the day, Manchin cares less about his constituents than he does about the fossil fuel industry.”The current, floundering attempt to pass climate legislation is a grimly familiar episode in a lengthy record of American inadequacy. Donald Trump donned a coal miner’s helmet on the campaign trail and removed the US from the Paris climate deal. Barack Obama failed to get cap-and-trade legislation past a recalcitrant Congress. George W Bush rejected the Kyoto climate accords. In 1993, a previous Democratic senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd, blocked a Bill Clinton plan to tax carbon emissions.Manchin is, in some respects, a “fall guy” for a deeper American political dysfunction over the climate crisis, Kyte said. “If Republicans weren’t in the lock-grip of certain vested interests, if they had a policy on climate adaptation or green jobs for the future, Joe Manchin wouldn’t have the influence he has,” she said.“Joe Manchin has become the personification of a problem and removing him doesn’t solve it,” Kyte added. “It doesn’t give us a bipartisan agreement of the danger we are in. A political culture that allows you to enrich yourself and your family from industries you regulate and not declare a conflict of interest lies beyond Joe Manchin, it’s bigger than just him.”Even if American political inertia hasn’t changed, the world certainly has – the last seven years were the planet’s hottest on record, cataclysmic wildfires are now year-round events in the US west and deadly flooding swamps basements in New York, picturesque towns in Germany and subways in China. There is mounting fear that the world, including the US, does not have the time for yet another futile American effort to address the unraveling climate crisis.“Unfortunately, politicians getting fossil fuel money are standing in the way and sacrificing the rest of us once again,” said Vanessa Nakate, a climate justice activist from Uganda. Nakate pointed out that Africa was suffering from climate change even though it is responsible for just a small fraction of global emissions.“We are so reliant on the choices others make,” she said. “Our lives are literally in their hands.”TopicsClimate crisisUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Sanders: ‘anti-democratic’ Republicans to blame for Biden woes, not just Manchin and Sinema

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      Sanders: ‘anti-democratic’ Republicans to blame for Biden woes, not just Manchin and SinemaSenator confirms he will campaign against moderate Democrats if they face primary challenges

      Robert Reich: Manchin and Sinema are all about their egos
      Bernie Sanders on Sunday sought to turn fire aimed by Democrats at two of their own, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, onto Republican senators he said were “pushing an anti-democratic agenda”.Kyrsten Sinema: Arizona Democrats censure senator for voting rights failureRead more“Republicans are laughing all the way to election day,” the Vermont senator told CNN’s State of the Union. “They have not had to cast one bloody vote which shows us where they’re at.”But the Vermont progressive also confirmed that he will campaign against Manchin and Sinema, both Democrats, should they face viable primary challengers.Manchin, from West Virginia, and Sinema, from Arizona, have blocked Democratic priorities including the Build Back Better spending plan and, this week, voting rights reform.Their refusal to contemplate reform to the filibuster, the rule which requires 60-vote majorities for most legislation, meant two voting rights bills in answer to Republican attacks on voting in states were always doomed to fail.On Saturday, Sinema was formally censured by her state party. Sanders said he supported that move. He also confirmed his threat to campaign against Sinema and Manchin in 2024.“If there was strong candidates prepared to stand up for working families who understand that the Democratic party has got to be the party of working people, taking on big money interests, if both candidates were there in Arizona and West Virginia, yes, I would be happy to support them.”But, Sanders insisted, “it’s not only those two. It is 50 Republicans who have been adamant about not only pushing an anti-democratic agenda but also opposing our efforts to try to lower the cost of prescription drugs, trying to expand Medicare … to improve the disaster situation in home healthcare, in childcare, to address the existential threat of climate change. “You’ve got 50 Republicans who don’t want to do anything except criticise the president and then you have, sadly enough, two Democrats who choose to work with Republicans rather than the president, and it will sabotage the president’s effort to address the needs of working families in this country.”Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press, Sanders insisted the Biden administration made “a great start”, in part with a Covid relief bill passed with just 50 votes and the casting vote of Vice-President Kamala Harris, but was now bogged down thanks in large part to Manchin and Sinema.“The president and the Democratic Congress,” Sanders said, “… looked at the economic crisis that was caused by Covid. We passed the American Rescue Plan … and we also passed along the way the strongest infrastructure bill that has been passed since Dwight D Eisenhower … We were off to a great start. “And then I will tell you exactly what happened. Fifty members of the Republican party decided that they were going to be obstructionist … and then you had two United States senators joining them, Mr Manchin and Senator Sinema. “For five months now there have been negotiations behind closed doors trying to get these two Democratic senators on board. That strategy, in my view, has failed. It has failed dismally. We saw it last week in terms of the Voting Rights Act. We now need a new direction.”Asked if he was frustrated, Sanders told CNN he was.But, he insisted, “we need to start voting. We need to bring important pieces of legislation that impact the lives of working families right onto the floor of the Senate. And Republicans want to vote against lowering the cost of climate change, home healthcare, whatever it may be. And if the Democrats want to join them, let the American people see what’s happening. “Then we can pick up the pieces and pass legislation.”Abolishing the filibuster won’t lead to a ‘tyranny of the majority’. It’s quite the opposite Read moreSome Democrats advocate splitting Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan into separate bills, in order to pass what they can.Sanders conceded that most such legislation will not pass, given Republican obstruction and the machinations of Manchin and Sinema. Bringing bills to the floor, he conceded, would really be about electoral politics ahead of midterms this year in which Republicans expect to take back the House and possibly the Senate, and the presidential contest in two years’ time.“Once we know where people are at,” he said, “then we can say, ‘All right, look, we have 50 votes here, we have just one vote here, 49 votes here. “But what has bothered me very much is Republicans are laughing all the way to election day. They have not had to cast one bloody vote, or two, which shows us where they’re at. And we’ve got to change.”TopicsBernie SandersUS SenateUS CongressDemocratsBiden administrationUS politicsUS domestic policynewsReuse this content More

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      Where egos dare: Manchin and Sinema show how Senate spotlight corrupts

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      Where egos dare: Manchin and Sinema show how Senate spotlight corruptsRobert ReichThe two Democratic senators chose to wreck American democracy, simply to feed their sense of their own importance What can possibly explain Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s decision to sink voting rights protections? Why did they create a false narrative that the legislation had to be “bipartisan” when everyone, themselves included, knew bipartisanship was impossible?Arizona Democrats censure Kyrsten Sinema for voting rights failureRead moreWhy did they say they couldn’t support changing Senate filibuster rules when only last month they voted for an exception to the filibuster that allowed debt ceiling legislation to pass with only Democratic votes?Why did they co-sponsor voting rights legislation and then vote to kill the very same legislation? Why did Manchin vote for the “talking filibuster” in 2011 yet vote against it now?Part of the answer to all these questions can be found in the giant wads of corporate cash flowing into their campaign coffers. But if you want the whole answer, you need also to look at the single biggest factor affecting almost all national politicians I’ve dealt with: ego. Manchin’s and Sinema’s are now among the biggest.Before February of last year, almost no one outside West Virginia had heard of Manchin and almost no one outside Arizona (and probably few within it) had ever heard of Sinema. Now, they’re notorious. They’re Washington celebrities. Their photos grace every major news outlet in America.This sort of attention is addictive. Once it seeps into the bloodstream, it becomes an all-consuming force. I’ve known politicians who have become permanently and irrevocably intoxicated.I’m not talking simply about power, although that’s certainly part of it. I’m talking about narcissism – the primal force driving so much of modern America but whose essence is concentrated in certain places such as Wall Street, Hollywood and the United States Senate.Once addicted, the pathologically narcissistic politician can become petty in the extreme, taking every slight as a deep personal insult. I’m told Manchin asked Joe Biden’s staff not to blame him for the delay of Build Back Better and was then infuriated when Biden suggested Manchin bore some of the responsibility. I’m also told that if Biden wants to restart negotiations with Manchin on Build Back Better, he’s got to rename it because Manchin is so angry he won’t vote for anything going by that name.The Senate is not the world’s greatest deliberative body but it is the world’s greatest stew of egos battling for attention. Every senator believes he or she has what it takes to be president. Most believe they’re far more competent than whoever occupies the Oval Office.Yet out of 100 senators, only a handful are chosen for interviews on the Sunday talk shows and very few get a realistic shot at the presidency. The result is intense competition for attention.Again and again, I’ve watched worthy legislation sink because particular senators didn’t feel they were getting enough credit, or enough personal attention from a president, or insufficient press attention, or unwanted press attention, or that another senator (sometimes from the same party) was getting too much attention.Several people on the Hill who have watched Sinema at close range since she became a senator tell me she relished all the attention she got when she gave her very theatrical thumbs down to increasing the minimum wage, and since then has thrilled at her national celebrity as a spoiler.Biden prides himself on having been a member of the senatorial “club” for many years before ascending to the presidency and argued during the 2020 campaign that this familiarity would give him an advantage in dealing with his former colleagues. But it may be working against him. Senators don’t want clubby familiarity from a president. They want a president to shine the national spotlight on them.Lindsey Graham, reverse ferret: how John McCain’s spaniel became Trump’s poodleRead moreSome senators get so whacky in the national spotlight that they can’t function without it. Trump had that effect on Republicans. Before Trump, Lindsey Graham was almost a normal human being. Then Trump directed a huge amp of national attention Graham’s way, transmogrifying the senator into a bizarro creature who’d say anything Trump wanted to keep the attention coming.Not all senators are egomaniacs, of course. Most lie on an ego spectrum ranging from mildly inflated to pathological.Manchin and Sinema are near the extreme. Once they got a taste of the national spotlight, they couldn’t let go. They must have figured that the only way they could keep the spotlight focused on themselves was by threatening to do what they finally did last week: shafting American democracy.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
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      Abolishing the filibuster won’t lead to a ‘tyranny of the majority’. It’s quite the opposite

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      Abolishing the filibuster won’t lead to a ‘tyranny of the majority’. It’s quite the opposite Jan-Werner MüllerWhat defenders of the filibuster want is minority rule – and a government unable to deliver anything meaningful to its people On Joe Manchin’s US Senate website, you can click on “Help from Joe”. American democracy (not to speak of another Joe) desperately needed his help this week. What it got instead was notes cribbed from constitutional law 101, selective and self-serving worship of a distant deity known as “the Founders”, and sanctimonious invocations of bipartisanship.The battle to secure free and fair conditions for voting through a simple Senate majority seems lost for the moment; and Republicans – who call for bipartisanship only when they happen to be in the minority – are gloating. But we should not move on so quickly. Otherwise, like dirt, the deeply misleading claims about the filibuster preventing a “tyranny of the majority”, advanced by Manchin and commentators thinking the point of politics is moderation for its own sake, might come to stick.Republican voter suppression is rampant. Manchin and Sinema are complicit now | Moira DoneganRead moreThe authors of the US constitution did indeed fear a tyranny of the majority. And they were agitated by the thought of decisions taken without proper deliberation; after all, even these men of the Enlightenment could not shake longstanding prejudices about the great unwashed masses falling victim to their “passions wresting the sceptre from reason”, as James Madison put it (adding for good measure that “had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates; every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob”.)Yet the framers worried no less about a tyranny of the minority. While they built in plenty of checks and balances, they did not seek to give veto powers to a minority within the Senate. After all, the latter was already through other designs the place for what Jefferson called a “natural aristocracy” to cogitate and deliberate. The chamber was not directly elected by the people before 1913, but both before and after, it has had an inbuilt bias for minorities, since every state, no matter how small, gets two senators. Never mind the filibuster: we have long been in a situation where Republicans can rule without a majority of the country behind them (for instance, by ramming through appointments to the US supreme court).Politicians like their constitutional legacies a la carte: what better than having the imperative to preserve your personal power be directly deduced from the wisdom of the framers? Yet an honest reckoning with history must face up to the fact that much we take to be indispensable for democracy was not only unforeseen in the 18th century, but positively abhorrent to the men meeting in Philadelphia.Most important, the Framers sought to avoid the very thing that today makes Manchin’s calls for consensus an act of bad faith: political parties, and an uncompromising spirit of partisanship (or what the Founders called “faction”) in particular. Evidently, Manchin himself does not quite believe in deliberation; why else have a huge placard with big, shouting letters next to him while delivering his speech? And just as evident: were he really so concerned about policies always having “input from all corners of the country”, why not require unanimity? If 51 can constitute a tyranny of the majority, why can’t 60?Biden asks what Republicans are for, and what McConnell wants, but the answer has been obvious for a decade or so: make his presidency fail. After all, the present minority leader honed his dark arts of political destruction during the Obama years. Of course, there is nothing wrong with an opposition opposing. In fact, that’s its job: it is supposed to offer a systematic alternative to what those who gained a majority are trying to do and hold those in power accountable. But that’s really as far as it goes, when it comes to what Manchin calls “the opportunity for the minority to participate”.A minority should have its say – but a majority must get its way. To enact what you have been empowered to enact does not mean, as Manchin puts it, “abandoning our Republican colleagues on important national issues”. It means not abandoning the people who put their trust in your ability actually to get stuff done.What defenders of the filibuster want is for the minority de facto to hold power. A supermajority requirement is not somehow neutral. It means opting for the status quo in a political system that its defenders, from the ancient Athenians onwards, always admired for its capacity to learn and innovate. Innovation does not mean you rush headlong into things – again, ancient prejudices echo when Manchin associates abolishing the filibuster with encouraging “volatility”, “haste” and “transitory passion”.The Trump tax cuts were the most rushed legislation in recent years; the measure was as incomprehensible to many senators voting for it as it was a delight for the lobbyists who had written it. Conversely, laws to reduce gun violence have been debated for years and have enormous, well-considered support among the supposedly fickle and irrational people – and yet something like the bipartisan Manchin-Toomey Bill, agreed after the Sandy Hook massacre, died in a political institution that makes some more equal than others.Plenty of historians have pointed out the use of the filibuster to preserve white supremacy. But even if the filibuster were not what Obama called a “Jim Crow relic”, the willful misunderstanding of legitimate minority input as minority rule is unacceptable: it disrespects the majority of citizens. There is no evidence that it leads to more bipartisanship; and there is no reason to believe that, as the master of mixing the maximum number of metaphors from West Virginia says, its end would “pour fuel on to the fire of political whiplash and dysfunction that is tearing this nation apart”.Even if one is not particularly concerned with the finer points of democratic theory (such as: if you get fewer votes, you lose the election), one should find the filibuster unacceptable because it disables government. As Biden keeps saying, democracy has to deliver for citizens. A system that turns into what Francis Fukuyama – not exactly a raving lefty radical – calls a vetocracy cannot do so.
      Jan-Werner Mueller teaches at Princeton and is a Guardian US columnist. His most recent book is Democracy Rules
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      Democrats fail to advance voting rights law as Senate holdouts defend filibuster

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      Democrats fail to advance voting rights law as Senate holdouts defend filibusterSweeping protections for voters, already passed by House and backed by Biden, fail to clear 60-vote procedural hurdle Senate Democrats failed again to pass sweeping new voting protections on Wednesday, in what may be the most brutal blow yet to efforts to strengthen protections for voters at a perilous moment for US democracy.Just as they have done four other times in recent months, all 50 Republicans united in their opposition to the measure. They relied on the filibuster, a Senate rule that requires 60 votes to advance legislation to a final vote.Bernie Sanders suggests he may support primary challengers against Manchin and SinemaRead moreDespite heavy pressure from Joe Biden and fellow Democrats, two senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, have dug in defending the measure, preventing Democrats from getting rid of it.In a rebuke to Biden, Sinema gave a speech on the Senate floor last week making it clear she would not support changes to the filibuster. Manchin has also consistently made his support clear. “I will not vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster. The filibuster plays an important role in protecting our democracy from the transitory passions of the majority and respecting the input of the minority in the Senate,” he said in a speech on Wednesday.Their opposition set up a showdown as the ultimately doomed bill was taken up for discussion on Wednesday. Late in the evening, Republicans used the filibuster to vote to end debate on the bill, effectively blocking it from advancing. Immediately afterwards, Democrats moved to hold a vote to try and change the filibuster rules anyway. The effort failed 52-48, with Manchin and Sinema voting with all 50 Republicans to preserve the filibuster. Sinema loudly said “aye” when it was her turn to vote in favor of preserving the filibuster changes.“I am profoundly disappointed that the United States Senate has failed to stand up for our democracy. I am disappointed — but I am not deterred,” Biden said in a statement.“Our Administration will continue to fight to pass federal legislation to secure the right to vote. We will not stop fighting against the anti-voter legislation that Republican legislatures continue to push at the state level—and to champion and support state and local elected officials who work to enact pro-voter legislation,” Kamala Harris said in a separate statement.“Isn’t protecting voting rights, the most fundamental wellspring of this democracy, more important than a rule?” Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, said just before the vote on the filibuster change.Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia said Democrats were seeking to restore a “talking filibuster”, where senators have to hold the floor of the US senate to prevent a vote on legislation.“We’re going to take up a rules reform proposal that will not blow up the senate,” he said on the Senate floor Wednesday evening. “It switches the secret filibuster into a public filibuster. It makes both parties work on the floor to get the kind of extended public debate we joined together to seek.”Senator Angus King of Maine, who once defended the filibuster, said the process that was in place was a “second cousin once removed of the filibuster”.“I’d venture to say if we had the rules we have today, we wouldn’t have the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act,” he said.Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, described Wednesday as “in all likelihood, the most important day in the history of the Senate.” He said the Democratic proposal was just “smoke and mirrors”, and accused Democrats of undertaking a plot to “to break the Senate”.The voting rights measure has failed before, but Wednesday marks the first time they have taken a formal vote on changing the filibuster. Its likely failure marks a profound setback for Biden’s presidential agenda. The president spent an enormous amount of political capital in recent weeks pressuring Manchin and Sinema to support rule changes to the filibuster, giving a speech in Atlanta and traveling to Capitol Hill to try to get support. In stirring remarks just before the vote on the voting rights bill, Raphael Warnock, a Democrat from Georgia, said senators could not praise the legacy of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr while voting against voting rights. “You cannot remember MLK and dismember his legacy at the same time,” Warnock said. “I will not sit quietly while some make Dr King a victim of identity theft.”“Those of us who are students of Dr King, I know I have, often wonder ‘what would I have done if I was alive during the civil rights movement?’ I know that we all would like to think we had a fraction, just a small fraction of the courage it took for John Lewis to cross that Edmund Pettus Bridge,” he said. “Well, for those of us who serve in the United States Senate in this moment, in this moral moment, we do not have to wonder … we don’t have to wonder what we would have done. I submit that what we would have done back then we are doing right now. History is watching us.”The bill that failed on Wednesday, Freedom to Vote: John R Lewis Act, combined two major voting rights bills into a single mega bill.It would have set a national baseline for election access, guaranteeing 15 days of early voting as well as online voter registration. It protected local election officials from harassment and partisan interference in their jobs and curbed gerrymandering, the severe distortion of partisan district lines. It also restored a key piece of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required places with a history of voting discrimination to get their changes approved by either the justice department or a federal court in Washington before they go into effect.The bill’s failure comes as states across the US have waged an aggressive effort to restrict voting access after the 2020 election, which saw record turnout. In total, 19 states have passed 34 bills that restrict voting access, making it harder to request and return a mail-in ballot, among other measures, even though there was no evidence of fraud, either in mail-in voting or otherwise, in 2020.Many of those efforts are obviously aimed at Black and other minority voters who helped Democrats win in 2020, activists say. As state legislatures reconvene, Republican lawmakers are proposing even more new restrictions.At the same time, Republicans in state legislatures are redrawing electoral districts at the state legislative and congressional level to virtually guarantee their re-election for the next decade. Seeing Democratic gains in traditionally Republican districts, Republicans have redrawn the lines to simply make many districts uncompetitive for the next decade, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.It’s a strategy that has blunted the growing power of Black, Hispanic and Asian voters in places like the suburbs, which are rapidly diversifying. In North Carolina, for example, Republicans lowered the Black voting age population of a district long represented by GK Butterfield, a former judge who is Black. It will be harder for Black voters in that district to elect their candidate of choice and Butterfield has since announced he is retiring from Congress.There is also growing concern about what experts call election subversion – efforts to inject more partisanship into election administration and counting votes.Republicans are passing laws that give them more partisan control over key administrative roles and Trump allies who have embraced the myth of a stolen election are running for secretary of state in places such as Georgia, Michigan, Arizona and Nevada – a perch from which they could exert enormous unilateral control over election rules.Civil rights groups have waged an aggressive campaign, privately and publicly, trying to get Manchin and Sinema to support a filibuster change. “Let’s be honest, every voter suppression bill passed in the 19 states across the country has been passed by Republicans alone. If one party can dismantle our democracy on its own, the other party should muster the courage to safeguard it,” Derrick Johnson, the president and CEO of the NAACP, wrote in a letter to senators.TopicsUS voting rightsThe fight to voteUS SenateUS politicsDemocratsJoe ManchinnewsReuse this content More

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      Schumer insists Senate will vote on voting rights bill ‘win, lose or draw’ – live

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      Senate will vote on voting rights ‘win, lose or draw,’ Schumer says

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      Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer argued Democrats have an obligation to do everything possible to pass voting rights legislation, despite the high likelihood of failure because of Republican filibustering.
      “If Republicans choose to continue their filibuster of voting rights legislation, we must consider and vote on the rule changes that are appropriate and necessary to restore the Senate and make voting rights legislation possible,” Schumer said in his floor speech.

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      .@SenSchumer: “If Republicans choose…their filibuster of voting rights legislation we must consider and vote on the rule changes that are appropriate and necessary to restore the Senate and make voting rights legislation possible.” pic.twitter.com/gbmNQZKMS9

      January 18, 2022

      But as of now, Schumer does not have the votes necessary to change the filibuster, as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema remain opposed to doing so.
      Because of the 50-50 split between Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, Schumer needs the support of every member of his caucus to reform the filibuster.

      4.39pm EST

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      White House launches ‘beta’ version of website to order Covid tests

      The Biden administration has launched the “beta” version of its website to order free, at-home coronavirus tests.
      The site, CovidTests.gov, includes a link to a US Postal Service form that allows Americans to request four tests to be shipped to their homes.
      White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said the site will officially launch tomorrow morning and noted there may be some glitches until then.
      “CovidTests.gov is in the beta phase right now, which is a standard part of the process typically as it’s being kind of tested,” Psaki said at her daily briefing.
      “Every website launch, in our view, comes with risk. We can’t guarantee there won’t be a bug or two, but the best tech teams across the administration and the postal service are working hard to make this a success.”
      The Biden administration has already ordered 1bn free at-home coronavirus tests to be distributed to Americans as the country confronts the highly transmissible Omicron variant.

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      Trump’s attorney general Barr to publish book

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