Democratic Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia are not adequately committed to the progressive cause, so liberal activists are beginning their effort to unseat them.
Politico reports that the No Excuses PAC, founded by some former staffers of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, is beginning its push to primary the two senators with an email beckoning support: “Help us find the next AOC to replace Manchin and Sinema.” (Keep in mind, though, that both are up for reelection in 2024 and that one or both could decide not to run again.)
This bit is from Politico’s story: “Manchin and Sinema’s opposition to eliminating the legislative filibuster — which requires a 60-vote threshold for most legislation — is the main reason No Excuses is putting a call out for possible challengers.”
A few things catch the eye here. One is that it requires extraordinary logical dissonance to say something like this: “The only real way to pressure any of these folks and hold them accountable to their promises is to threaten their power, and threaten the seat that they hold and threaten their re-election.” That’s what Saikat Chakrabarti, a former chief of staff to Ocasio-Cortez and a co-founder of the PAC, told Politico about the primary effort.
Manchin is being faithful to his promises, though — his promises to not support eliminating the filibuster. Manchin said in November, “I’m not going to be part of breaking the Senate, I can tell you that.” Sinema, as far as I have seen, isn’t reneging on any promise to support eliminating the filibuster. In point of fact, she has shown an appreciation for the Senate’s deliberative structure for some time.
Chakrabarti is falling into a bad habit, a habit that one famous leftist wrote a great deal about, and quite critically. In his nonfiction, George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm and 1984, took up in several places the reversion to lazy and vacuous political speech. “If phrases like ‘unprincipled violation of declared pledges’ or ‘insidious threat to the basic principles of democracy’ don’t mean anything to the average man,” he wrote in “Propaganda and Demotic Speech,” “then it is stupid to use them.” Orwell had anticipated this interview.
Or maybe he had been reading the Washington Post opinion page. Columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. wrote a few days ago that Democrats can either “protect the filibuster or protect democracy.”
In this case, the hook is “hold them accountable to their promises.” Chakrabarti is really just packaging his disruptive filibuster wish in the weighty terms of “their promises” to make an appeal that it’s Manchin’s and Sinema’s moral responsibility to support it. It’s rubbish. They aren’t violating any promise.
“We sort of have this theory that the voters in Arizona and the voters in West Virginia would care more about action, they care more about jobs and their community and money in their pockets than they do about an arcane Senate rule called the filibuster,” Chakrabarti also said in the Politico interview.
Some theory. It’s sort of self-refuting: People in Arizona and West Virginia don’t care about the filibuster. By the way, the filibuster is explicitly the wedge we are using to try and unseat these two senators.
There’s one more thing to take notice of here. The Democratic coalition’s revolutionaries are so ideologically rigid that they are unwilling to grant lawmakers such as Manchin and Sinema any deference to govern for their constituencies. West Virginia is a Republican state. The last time it went blue in a presidential election was 1996. Manchin’s Senate counterpart is a Republican, his governor is a Republican, and the state legislature has a Republican majority.
Arizona is no Democratic wonderland, either, having gone to the Republican candidate in 10 of the last 12 presidential elections. Arizona went for Biden in 2020, and it just elected a second Democratic senator, Mark Kelly, but its governor and legislature are Republican.
The point is, Manchin and Sinema don’t have the same mandate as, say, New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. Appreciating that doesn’t require charity; it just requires a recognition that members of Congress represent people with varying interests.
Then again, one can hardly appreciate that pluralistic view (and embrace compromise as a necessary mechanism of governance) if he endlessly tells himself that the choice is either to protect the filibuster or protect democracy.
