“Senator Joe Manchin just indicated he would not blow up the filibuster to codify Roe, saying he believes the filibuster is a check on power that preserves abortion rights. Without Manchin, the chance of passing Roe into law is pretty much zero.”
What can possibly explain Manchin’s and Sinema’s votes against voting rights last Wednesday? Why did they create a false narrative that the legislation had to be “bipartisan” when everyone – themselves included – knew bipartisanship was impossible?
Why did they say they couldn’t support changing the filibuster rules when only last month they voted for an exception to the filibuster that allowed debt ceiling legislation to pass with only Democratic votes?
Why did they co-sponsor voting rights legislation and then vote to kill the very same legislation? Why did Manchin vote for the “talking filibuster” in 2011 yet vote against it now?
Part of the answer to all these questions can be found in the giant wads of corporate cash flowing into their campaign coffers.
But if you want the whole answer, you need to look at the single biggest factor affecting almost all national politicians I’ve dealt with: Big egos. Manchin’s and Sinema’s are now among the biggest.
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Before February of last year, almost no one outside West Virginia had ever heard of Joe Manchin, and almost no one outside of Arizona (and probably few within the state) had ever heard of Kyrsten Sinema. Now, they’re notorious. They’re Washington celebrities. Their photos grace every major news outlet in America.
This sort of attention is addictive. Once it seeps into the bloodstream, it becomes an all-consuming force. I’ve known politicians who have become permanently and irrevocably intoxicated by it.
I’m not talking simply about power, although that’s certainly part of it. I’m talking about narcissism – the primal force driving so much of modern America, but whose essence is concentrated in certain places such as Wall Street, Hollywood, and the United States Senate.
Once addicted, the pathologically narcissistic politician can become petty in the extreme, taking every slight as a deep personal insult. I’m told that Manchin asked Biden’s staff not to blame him for the delay of “Build Back Better,” and was then infuriated when Biden suggested Manchin bore some of the responsibility. I’m also told that if Biden wants to restart negotiations with Manchin on “Build Back Better,” he’s got to rename the package because Manchin is so angry he won’t vote for anything going by that name.
The Senate is not the world’s greatest deliberative body, but it isthe world’s greatest stew of egos battling for attention. Every senator believes he or she has what it takes to be president. Most believe they’re far more competent than whoever occupies the Oval Office.
Yet out of one hundred senators, only a handful are chosen for interviews on the Sunday talk shows, only one or two are lampooned on SNL, and very few get a realistic shot at the presidency. The result is intense competition for national attention.
Again and again, I’ve watched worthy legislation sink because particular senators didn’t feel they were getting enough credit, or enough personal attention from a president, or insufficient press attention, or unwanted press attention, or that another senator (sometimes from the same party) was getting too muchattention.
Several people on the Hill who have watched Sinema at close range since she became a senator tell me she relished all the attention she got when she gave her very theatrical thumbs down to increasing the minimum wage, and since then has thrilled at her national celebrity as a spoiler.
Biden prides himself on being a member of the senatorial “club” for many years before ascending to the presidency and argued during the 2020 campaign that this familiarity would give him an advantage in dealing with his former colleagues. But it may have worked against him. Senators don’t want clubby familiarity from a president. They want a president to shine the national spotlight on them.
Some senators get so whacky in the national limelight that they can’t function without it. Trump had that effect on Republicans. Before Trump, Lindsay Graham was almost a normal human being. Then Trump directed a huge amp of national attention Graham’s way — transmogrifying Graham into a bizarro creature who’d say anything Trump wanted in order to keep the attention coming.
Not all senators are egomaniacs, of course. Most lie on an ego spectrum ranging from mildly inflated to pathological.
Manchin and Sinema are near the extreme. Once they got a taste of the national spotlight, they couldn’t let go. They must have figured that the only way they could keep the spotlight focused on themselves was by threatening to do what they finally did this week — shafting American democracy.
The filibuster is more important to DC Democrats than children’s lives.
Today, American schools are so plagued by terror of mass shooters that almost all of them drill for it regularly. As Kieran Healy writes, “My son and daughter have been institutionally readied to be shot dead as surely as I, at their age, was readied by my school to receive my first communion.” The Sandy Hook massacre was a decade ago, and the Senate has been doing nothing but blocking any gun control measures since that time. If any political body has ever forfeited its right to exist, it is the Senate.
“Few moments illustrate so perfectly the personal and political evolution of Arizona’s junior senator. When Sinema was first becoming active in state politics as a lefty political activist—she ran as a Green Party member and as an independent before finally joining the Democratic fold—she viewed Lieberman as the embodiment of Washington sellouts. As I reported in a profile of Sinema for the magazine, Sinema even protested outside of a Lieberman campaign event when the senator was running for president in 2003. “He’s a shame to Democrats,” she told a reporter from the Hartford Courant at the time. “I don’t even know why he’s running. He seems to want to get Republicans voting for him—what kind of strategy is that?” Lieberman, she added, was “pathetic.””
She’s despicable. Manchin is despicable. Our planet is literally burning to death. Americans are suffering in record numbers because of corporate greed and state-sanctioned police violence. Fascists are literally inches away from seizing control of the federal government.
Literally the only chance, the last chance, the best chance we have to do LITERALLY A SINGLE THING about any of this is now. If laws are not passed to address these things, it’s over.
I’m going to be fine. I’m rich and white and male in America. Nothing bad will ever happen to me because I live in a white supremecist, racist, oligarchy that privileges people like me over everyone else who isn’t richer than I am.
But people who don’t have my privilege are going to suffer. My children will suffer. If I have grandchildren, they will never know a planet that isn’t dying.
And all of this ALL OF IT is happening because of two people.
That’s it. Two people. Rich, selfish, sociopaths, who are willing to let the planet burn while they hold the door wide open for Trump and his fascists to storm in and take over the whole place.
When Manchin and Sinema completely destroy Biden’s agenda, when they finish jamming the knife as far as they can into the backs of the people who voted for them, it’s over. Forever. If it isn’t Trump in 2024, it’s someone just as bad if not worse. Women’s rights are gone. Trans rights are gone. It’s only a matter of time before they come for same sex couples. Every. Single. Thing. we have fought so hard for since before I was even born, all of it, is undone and gone.
And for what? FOR WHAT? Money? Attention? Someone explain to me like I’m five years old how these two people who are standing between Democracy and Fascism are totally cool with it.
I’m no political genius, but I can look at what Republican Fascists are doing in Texas, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Florida. I know what they want to do on a national level. There is no way Manchin and Sinema don’t know that. There is no way they don’t understand the stakes.
There’s no way every single member of the Democratic caucus doesn’t understand the stakes.
And it’s all going to fucking wither and die. For the greed, hubris, and inexplicable selfishness of two people.
I started this with a quote about Sinema, who was once a progressive activist. She called out Lieberman for what he was, and now that’s what she has become.
I sincerely hope that she wakes up at night, and can’t go back to sleep. I hope she sits there in the dark and stays awake all night, while the person she was screams at her and tells her that she’s a fucking sell out. She has betrayed and stabbed in the back everyone who worked to elect her, as well as the literal millions of Democrats in America who worked to help elect Biden and defeat Trump. But, based on everything I have seen of her, from hiding out in a bathroom to avoid constituents to flying around the fucking world for fundraisers while the entire future of America hangs by a thread, that she sleeps beautifully.
Goddamn her, goddamn him. All I can do at this point is hope that, somehow, after the Fascists take control, Sinema and Manchin are the first against the wall. In a just world, one of those Game of Thrones SHAME people would follow them around for the rest of their fucking lives.
