Vote Out

President Biden and the Democrats are likely to face a final defeat of the voting-rights legislation in the Senate tomorrow, and all indications are that Biden's incendiary speech in Atlanta about the need to pass the legislation satisfied few people - and those few are in no position to do anything about it.

The speech was primarily aimed at Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, to get them to change their minds about offering a carve-out for the filibuster to allow these bills to pass, or at least reform the filibuster to force senators who use the practice to talk for hours rather than just put a block on it.  They're not budging.  Biden couldn't even satisfy voting rights activists with his speech because he didn't have a plan to back up his efforts to get the legislation passed - he was winging it, improvising as he went along.  All Biden did was offend the two senators in question for suggestion comparison  between them and Jefferson Davis or George Wallace, and his efforts to change their minds in private conversations yielded nothing.

So what's left?  Just what Biden's efforts yielded.  Nothing.  Democrats will try to push the legislation and get nowhere due to Republican opposition, and when they try to make an issue out of voting rights in the midterm election campaigns, they'll realize too late that inflation and possibly the pandemic will continue to be he dominating issues of 2022 - and the country can't seem to get beyond either.  Look for the Republicans to take over both houses of Congress in the midterms and see them investigate Biden all the way through 2023 and 2024 while voting rights are chipped away even more in the states - and by the way, the voting-rights legislation the Democrats have offered does little if anything to regulate the counting of the votes, and the Republicans will likely use laws allowing them to nullify results in different states  to win back the White House . . . possibly with Trump at the head of the ticket. 

And then 45 will become 47 when he takes the oath of office on January 20, 2025, which will be the third Monday in January that year.  That is, Martin Luther King Day.

Oh, the irony!

Progressives will not give President Biden any credit for trying as hard as he could to get voting-rights legislation passed.  Because progressives pretty much follow Yoda's maxim: Do or don't do.  There is no "try."

Bipartisanship?

It seems that the war against voting is over, and voting lost . . . after Joe Manchin dropped the big one.

Manchin, a moderate Democrat from West Virginia who has enormous power - something that might not have happened if North Carolina Democratic Senate candidate Cal Cunningham hadn't been caught sexting and the party had a 51-49 majority in the Senate - ruled out voting for the voting rights bill the House passed, called the For the People Act.  He argues that the bill politicizes voting just like the Republicans have been doing so in the states.  Also, he's not going to support ending the filibuster in the Senate.

So that's it, right?  Joe Biden is not only going to be a one-term President, he's going to be a half-term President once the Republicans take back Congress in 2022?

Time out, people.  Manchin never said he's against bills that protect voting rights.  He's just against this one.  I don't profess to be an expert on voting rights legislation, but I understand that the arguments against it are that it does little to end gerrymandering and even less to stop partisan officials from hijacking the vote count and throwing out results they don't like.  Rather, Manchin's hoping to gain support for the less comprehensive but still effective John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would restore the 1965 Voting Rights Act and allow the federal government to oversee changes in state voting laws.  He and his fellow senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, are working to get that passed.  (I'm not going any deeper into the intricacies of either bill, because that's above my pay grade.)

As for eliminating the filibuster, Manchin may be right about keeping it, because without the filibuster, a Republican majority could bass bad legislation in the Senate quite simply under a Republican President ready, willing and able to sign it.  And if the Republicans deny President Biden a comprehensive infrastructure bill or two-time him by agreeing to a deal on infrastructure and then stopping it, then and only then would Manchin be likely to enable it to pass through reconciliation.  But he'd still keep the filibuster.   

As for how President Biden's agenda moves forward, we'll see what happens.  But it looks like Manchin's fingerprints will be all over it.     

As for the President's negotiations with Senator Shelly Moore Capito (R-WV) on the infrastructure bill, well, I think he's negotiating with the wrong West Virginia senator. 

Job Jive

Somewhere between Tony Hayward's clueless testimony before a House committee over the BP disaster yesterday and Texas Republican Joe Barton's apology to BP for having the government interfere with their profits, you can take some solace and pleasure in the defenders of corporate interests make fools of themselves . . . until you realize that they have the power to block continued unemployment benefits.

The Senate failed to overcome a Republican filibuster of a new stimulus package with extended benefits for people whose unemployment insurance is about to run out. One Democrat who sided with the Republicans, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, expressed reservations about more government spending when the economy is improving.

Even though the economy may be getting better, the job market is not. Employers are still reluctant to hire anyone because of uncertainty in the strength of the recovery. So you have all the economic indicators going in the right direction and employers all saying, "Well. . . ."

The Republicans keep sticking it to the little guy and blame their troubles on the Democrats. Who are they kidding? Apparently, most of us; Republicans are still favored to gain seats in Congress in the polls.

The Senator From Aetna

Joe Lieberman recently said that no one really believes health care reform will pass as the bills in Congress are currently written. Of course no one believes it; Lieberman, the senator from Aetna, has the power to stop it all by himself! He can filibuster it all by himself, and President Obama is inexplicably content to let the process work itself out.

The overwhelming majority of Senate Democrats, who are the majority overall, supports a health care reform plan with a strong public insurance option, as does the President. Yet even if Nebraska's Ben Nelson, Arkansas's Blanche Lincoln, and Louisiana's Mary Landrieu were to suddenly support this bill (don't hold your breath!), Lieberman can still stop it on his own with a filibuster that 58 Democrats and an independent can't stop.

The federal government is a system of checks and balances. The health insurance establishment gives Lieberman a check, and Lieberman adds it to his campaign fund account balance.