One House Democrat compared Sen. Joe Manchin to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell regarding his opposition to the Democrats’ election reform bill in Congress.
Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a freshman lawmaker from New York, rebuked his Democratic colleague during a Monday morning interview on CNN, saying that the West Virginia senator is “doing everything in his power to stop democracy and to stop our work for the people, the work that the people sent us here to do.”
“Joe Manchin has become the new Mitch McConnell,” Bowman said. “Mitch McConnell during Obama’s presidency said he would do everything in his power to stop Obama. He’s also repeated that now during the Biden presidency by saying he would do everything in his power to stop President Biden.”
‘IT WOULD DIVIDE US FURTHER’: MANCHIN TO VOTE AGAINST DEMOCRATS’ ELECTION BILL
“H.R. 1 not only is a huge bill when it comes to voting rights, it’s a huge bill in terms of getting big money out of politics, protecting our elections against fraud, and ending gerrymandering. I mean, big money in politics is what’s destroying our democracy, and the Republican Party is aiding and abetting in that. And Donald Trump is obviously doing that as well,” he continued. “So Manchin is not pushing us closer to bipartisanship. He is doing the work of the Republican Party by being an obstructionist, just like they’ve been since the beginning of Biden’s presidency.”
On Sunday, Manchin reiterated his opposition and intention to vote against the omnibus election overhaul bill that passed in the House without Republican support in March.
“I think it’s the wrong piece of legislation to bring our country together and unite our country, and I’m not supporting that because I think it would divide us further. I don’t want to be in a country that’s divided any further than I’m in right now. I love my country, and I think my Democrat and Republican colleagues feel the same,” he told Fox News’s Chris Wallace.
The bill requires 60 votes to pass the Senate, so Manchin’s opposition is not the nail in the bill’s coffin. Rather, the Left faces a hurdle with the filibuster. If Democrats were to eliminate the filibuster, the vote on S. 1 would only require a 50-50 split in which Vice President Kamala Harris could cast the tiebreaking vote. Both Manchin and Democratic Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema have repeatedly said they don’t support ending the filibuster.
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In his opposition, Manchin repeated his rebuke of calls to get rid of the filibuster. He has noted that 33 of his Democratic Senate colleagues sent a letter to McConnell and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in 2017 stressing the importance of keeping the filibuster because, at the time, Trump was urging them publicly to scrap it.
