In Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) recent memo, where he stakes out his policy positions on voting rights legislation, his alterations to the John Lewis Voting Rights Act were overshadowed by the pages of notes on S.1, the For the People Act.
Quelle surprise. Manchin is a racist. Who would have guessed? /s
I think Manchin had already been neutered.
By a Snapping Yertle.
Did he get these ideas from Lieberman’s No Labels group?
As long as Manchin is talking with them nothing will get done.
It’s easy to forget sometimes that Manchin is born and bred West Virginian. One doesn’t have to believe he’s a racist to see that the key issues the Voting Rights act addresses hold no real interest for him, no valence.
No matter what Manchin proposes, no R’s will vote for it anyway.
Kill the filibuster, now.
From another thread…
["The 1944 Allies had an entire invasion force ‘located’ where it really wasn’t.
For obvious reasons…
That logic applies here w/r/t what Chuck, Kamala, Joe, Nancy know and ‘know’.
The stunning thing (taken for granted) in this political situation is that today’s GOP is on par with the 1944 Allies’ opponent, w/r/t being a highly highly dangerous menace to us all."]
Before the Gloom Patrol weighs in, I wish to posit the above.
these religious people who can not see the miracle of life in their fellow travelers have a lot of damn gall pretending to love their creator.
There is a gargantuan Right Wing Messaging Machine which exists and which skillfully gets a ton of hate into people.
As was stated in the article Manchin hasn’t been interested in voting rights in the past. And the things that he is objecting to would mean that voters would have to jump through hoops to vote, or be denied an easy path to vote. So they have to be harmed by current, and soon to be current state laws. They then would have to go to court before the laws could be changed.
So why does Joe think that it’s OK for states to make it harder to vote, or harder to vote in certain areas of a state? Isn’t there suppose to be some guiding principle about equal access to the voting booth?
Some of them really seem to think of their in-group as God’s only loved ones, and all other humans as sinful and wrong, as if their omnipotent Lord-of-All either messed up a lot or lost His only loved world to other powerful beings. Sounds imperfect.
All they would have to do is expand their in-group to all life on Earth. The doctrine should apply to all life in the universe, if God is what they say He is. But we don’t need to worry about angels and Tau-Ceti-ans now; if we can just get them to include “all life on Earth”, that would cut way down on crusades and racial violence and bigotry. That might create room to show them how not ruining the atmosphere and ecosystem (the one which God presumably created) would help all the plants and animals all over the Earth and its seas.
I think it’s actually worse than that. They are peddling fear, which quickly becomes hatred. Fear of minorities, fear of whites losing their dominance in our society, fear of…everything.
I agree…and through it all, the $$$$$$$$$ people get more. There is a reason that the correlation between the monetizing of politics and the rise of the RWNJ Machine is close to
+1.00
The Voting Rights Act once included a formula that determined which states and localities had histories of discrimination in voting
Why spend time trying to create a “formula” to satisfy the standards that have not been enumerated by the Supreme Court? That would be nothing more than a SWAG and it is literally back to square one when the Court gives you a participation ribbon for effort. Make preclearance applicable to all the states and trust the AG to clear routine changes in short order and make a federal case out of those he deems to be discriminatory.
Then make the Act retroactively effective to the date the Supreme Court gutted the VRA in Shelby County. The latter change should garner 100% support from the GOP because, as they are wont to say, you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide.
It’s Democrats sabotaging Democrats now.
They can pass any of the progressive legislation that they have been promising for decades without a single Republican vote.
The Democrats have all the power. We, a large majority of voters, gave it to them.
But the so-called “moderate” Democrats are sabotaging President Biden in the same way they sabotaged President Obama in his first 2 years.
"In the past, his fallback was that unless it’s bipartisan, he’s not gonna touch it — we were completely stymied before this.”
Earth to earnest optimists…you are still completely stymied by this logistical political nightmare but at least you can claim that we’re gaining on it…
I’d like to make the case for hope.
Each step Manchin takes in the direction of reform (here, away from reflexive bipartisanship) confirms it, I think. And the fact that his bullet points are vague and uniformed suggests that they are political markers, not well-reasoned and firm positions.
Polarization is compatible with most people still not paying much attention to politics. Even the current tribalism can be seen as a way of saving the time and trouble to figure out where to stand on an issue. And about a fifth of the electorate still codes “bipartisan” as moderate and above all, reasonable. (We can say that bipartisan majorities voted to impeach TFG the second time, and voted to create a January 6 commission, and this will be effective with them.) They also give credit to the positions of a politician who evokes the anger of the more extreme and committed members of their party. I believe this semi-informed bloc is even bigger in West Virginia, and that’s who he’s playing to. It also might be our swing vote, and margin of victory, nationally.
So Manchin welcomes the brickbats from the left as he creeps toward the center of the Democratic caucus. I don’t know how far he is going to go, but he’s our 50th vote in an anti-majoritarian institution, so we can’t do without him. He’s going in the right direction, and his journey is going to weaken the Republican backlash when it comes.
But some of his best friends are black…he loves the blacks…totally against slavery…
To paraphrase an old perfume ad, Manchin is now onboard with “Promise them* anything but give them the finger.”
* Edited for clarity - The members of his own party
I hope some democrats get elected!!