Democrats came back from Christmas break to some bad news this week: President Joe Biden has only grown more unpopular in the new year. Also, voters are telling pollsters they are less likely to vote for Democrats in this year’s midterm elections than ever before.
We have outlined before how Democrats could turn their fortunes around — bring back former President Donald Trump’s successful policies to restore order to the southern border, send Vice President Kamala Harris to her native California to tackle the state’s growing crime wave, and then solve inflation by abandoning plans for more deficit spending and ending federal vaccine mandates, which exacerbate the labor shortage crisis.
Democrats, however, are choosing a completely different path, one that will only cruelly raise the hopes of the base of their party, only for them to crush them through defeat after defeat on the Senate floor.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has promised to begin the pain sometime before Martin Luther King Day, when he will schedule a vote on ending the filibuster so that Democrats can pass a bill with just 50 votes that would nationalize election law.
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin has said he supports the underlying legislation but that he cannot support any supposed one-time carveout to the Senate’s filibuster rule, which requires 60 votes for debate on a bill to begin or end.
“Once you change a rule, or you have a carveout, you eat the whole turkey,” Manchin told reporters Tuesday. Manchin is right, as he often is these days. Once you end the filibuster for one piece of legislation, you’ve effectively ended it for all legislation. This is exactly what happened to the nomination process when then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid ended the filibuster for nominations back in 2013.
But what about the debt limit hike passed by Democrats last year with 50 votes? That was a one-time special carveout of the filibuster. Why can’t Democrats do that again? The answer is that there is more than one way to change Senate rules.
Senate rules can be ignored and modified by the unanimous consent of all 100 senators at any time. This is actually how the Senate conducts most of its business. Senate rules can also be changed by statute, which requires 60 votes, as any legislation in the Senate does. This is how the entire reconciliation process was created by the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. This is also how the debt limit was raised last year. Thirteen Republican senators voted with Democrats on a separate piece of legislation that changed Senate rules to allow the debt limit to be raised with 50 votes.
Manchin has always said, and still says today, that he is open to changing Senate rules surrounding the filibuster but only if at least 10 Republicans sign on to the rule change. This is how it should be — rule changes should not be partisan power grabs. Zero Republicans are going to sign on to a one-time rule change enabling Senate Democrats to ban voter identification laws in all 50 states.
Schumer knows this, but for some reason, he plans to force Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema to vote anyway. Manchin and Sinema will vote to preserve the filibuster, and Democrats will have their first big loss of the month.
Sometime after that, Schumer will set in motion a second wave of Democratic failure. “We are going to vote on a revised version of the House-passed Build Back Better Act, and we will keep voting on it until we get something done,” Schumer promised in December. He has given no indication of backing down.
For his part, Manchin has always said he welcomes a vote on Build Back Better, but he has been very clear that he will not vote for it, meaning it will fail. “Despite my best efforts, I cannot explain the sweeping Build Back Better Act in West Virginia,” Manchin said last year, “and I cannot vote to move forward on this mammoth piece of legislation.” Since returning to Washington this month, Manchin has not only said he hasn’t changed his mind but that nothing is being negotiated with the White House.
It is unclear what Schumer’s endgame is here. Starting the year off with defeat after defeat seems like an odd way of convincing voters your party deserves reelection. But if the alternative for Democrats is to stand around defending themselves about rising inflation, continued disorder on the border, and a coronavirus that won’t disappear despite Biden’s promise to end it … well, maybe it does make some sense after all.
