Frustrated with their refusal to budge off maintaining the filibuster to advance President Joe Biden’s liberal agenda, the nation’s top labor leader Tuesday welcomed efforts that could prompt 2024 primary challenges to Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
Newly installed AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said that she is supporting local efforts to press West Virginia’s Manchin and Arizona’s Sinema to switch or else.
“Those are the decisions that are made at the local level, based on how elected officials perform and the way they vote. So, I think those discussions will be happening in states like Arizona,” she said in a pre-Labor Day meeting with a handful of reporters.
“There’s a lot of live conversations happening,” she said, adding that Sinema is receiving extra pressure. Labor leaders, she said, “are in Sen. Sinema’s office weekly, daily pushing, pushing. So, we’ll keep on doing that, and we’ll keep mobilizing on the ground at the same time, walking the halls of Congress and exerting pressure on them there.”
In her debut media roundtable since becoming president two weeks ago following the sudden death of former President Richard Trumka, Shuler wasn’t threatening, just matter-of-fact in calling out roadblocks to Big Labor’s legislative agenda. The roundtable was sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.
Both Manchin and Sinema have continued to signal their support for the filibuster legislative tool that Democrats claim threatens to kill most controversial Biden agenda items because the Senate is evenly divided. Both have also questioned some of Biden’s huge spending plans.
Shuler, the labor federation’s first female president, was in Arizona over the weekend and joined in one of the national voting rights marches held on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech.
She said that the union will build on local support to push changes on the national level, especially eliminating the filibuster.
“We’re going to continue to push to get those 50-plus one votes and push to reform the filibuster. And we’re going to build that support outside of Washington which I was just doing when I was in Arizona a couple of days ago. So, the grassroots is really where the action is where the pressure builds because we know the U.S. Senate responds to its constituents, for the most part. And if we don’t clear a pathway to free up the agenda that Americans voted for by getting rid of these arcane rules in the Senate, then I think we’ll see the results in the next election, right? People are anxious to get the voting rights legislation passed, to get this infrastructure bill passed, to get the ProAct passed. And so, we’re going to continue to push both inside and outside of Washington,” she said.
