Kamala Harris Wants To Break Filibuster For Abortion, Loses Coveted Joe Manchin Endorsement

Oh well, that's too bad.

Photo: Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons License 2.0

Just a reminder: Right after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Joe Biden said he supported changing the Senate’s rules on the filibuster if that would allow Democrats to enshrine Roe in law with a simple majority. (It currently takes 60 votes in the Senate to do anything that Republicans don’t like, but 51 votes to do anything they do.) That was in addition to Biden’s earlier support for a filibuster exception to pass protections for voting rights, a reform that was blocked in January of that year by Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, both then still nominally Democrats. (Both subsequently left the party and are leaving the Senate after this term.) Vice President Kamala Harris called for the same two filibuster exceptions at the Democratic National Convention’s summer meeting in September 2022.

We mention this as context for Harris’s call Monday for a filibuster carveout to make Roe the law of the land again if she’s elected along with a Democratic Congress. In a Wisconsin Public Radio interview that aired Tuesday, Harris reiterated what’s basically been the administration’s view for over two years now:

“I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe, 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.”

So hey, not really a huge surprise that Harris still supports the same position, but from some of the reaction, you’d think she had called for something really crazy like termination of the Constitution.

Now, if Democrats do manage to win the trifecta in November, electing Harris, holding the Senate, and retaking the House, it really would be possible for filibuster reform to go through, since Sinema and Manchin won’t be in the Senate anymore. But that’s no reason for Joe Manchin to refrain from getting his name in headlines again. On CNN yesterday, Manchin proclaimed that he simply cannot endorse Harris for her offense against the filibuster, a Senate rule that isn’t in the Constitution and which has mostly served as a mainstay against advancing civil rights and other good legislation.

Manchin, who refuses to go gentle into that good irrelevance, explained that without the filibuster, you’d end up with something perilously close to representative democracy:

“Shame on her. 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.”

Thing of it is, the filibuster isn’t any Holy Grail of democracy. Hell, it isn’t even the fake Grail that led chaste Sir Galahad into temptation at Castle Anthrax. Despite Manchin’s cherished fictions, the filibuster doesn’t encourage bipartisan cooperation; it simply ensures that nothing gets done. In practice, plenty of bills with bipartisan support have been thwarted because they couldn’t reach the 60-vote threshold in the Senate.

And of course the Senate has already modified the filibuster to allow majority-only confirmation of Cabinet appointees and federal judges, and later, Supreme Court justices, as well as permitting budget bills to pass by the weirdass “reconciliation” process, which was how we got the Affordable Care Act and the Inflation Reduction Act (yay) but also Trump’s Big Fat Tax Cut for Rich Fuckwads (boo). In other words, we already have simple majority rule in the Senate for lots of things, so maybe it would be a good idea to allow important stuff like voting rights and bodily autonomy to be protected, too.

As for Manchin, this latest crap, as well as his weird decision two weeks ago to endorse Republican Larry Hogan over Democrat Angela Alsobrooks in Maryland’s US Senate race, seems mostly to indicate that Manchin genuinely thinks Republicans should take over the Senate. Or worse, that he can’t bring himself to endorse a Black woman at the national level, but it would be pretty awful if that were the case, huh?

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OK, But What About All The Times The Filibuster HELPED Pass Civil Rights? (Spoiler: There Were None)

Sinema, Manchin Would Do Anything For Voting Rights, But They Won't Do That

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[CNN / New York / Wisconsin Public Radio / The Hill]

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