Why Democrats haven’t given up on Joe Manchin and voting rights
They confront a familiar conflict over the Senate’s role in the American system. Political minorities embrace the filibuster — which now requires a 60-vote supermajority to cut off debate — as a shield protecting their rights; majorities chafe at the obstacle it presents to action on national priorities.
Repeatedly, that conflict has surfaced over attempts to safeguard the vote, among other civil rights protections. As the civil rights movement intensified after World War II, pro-segregation Southern senators made the filibuster their bulwark against proposals to ban “poll taxes” that impeded voting by Blacks.
For two decades beginning in the 1950s, frustrated liberals pressed for rules changes to weaken the filibuster. In 1957, the year Manchin turned 10, their ideas revolved around permitting a majority of senators to end debate after 15 days. Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, as biographer Robert Caro recounted in “Master of the Senate,” flatly rejected them.
Today, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and nearly the entire Democratic caucus support rules changes. They’ve floated several options that could take effect if every Democrat supported them.
A third option, which enjoys the most support among Democratic senators, would make filibusters harder to mount and easier to end. Instead of initiating a filibuster by simple declaration, and forcing proponents of action to overcome it, it would require filibustering senators to talk continuously, as popularized by Jimmy Stewart in the 1939 movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”
It would guarantee that the minority could offer a specified number of amendments to the legislation at issue. It would let every senator speak on the floor twice. But it would ultimately allow the majority to end debate and force final action with 51 votes, not 60.
But Manchin’s inability to attract Republican support for his voting rights bill underscores how, more typically, the filibuster halts action on contentious issues altogether. That’s why his Democratic colleagues keep trying.
“You have a consensus among Senate Democrats that our democracy is at risk, and that does create an opportunity for reform,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, one of those involved. “The verdict is still out.”
“I think it’s a 30-40% chance that we’ll get something significant,” said Norm Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
As it happens, those Democratic liberals in 1957 ended up winning limited voting rights protections without changing the filibuster. That’s because Johnson, straddling his alliance with fellow Southerners and his ambition to win national favor for a later presidential run, engineered passage of a modest civil rights bill.
Later, as president, Johnson pushed through the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. Two months after voting rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, endured attacks from local law enforcement on “Bloody Sunday,” he and Senate allies overcame a Southern filibuster by rallying a bipartisan group of 70 senators to end debate.
It took another decade before the Senate made filibusters easier to stop. In 1975, a majority of senators voted to reduce the threshold for ending debate from two-thirds to three-fifths, or 60 senators.
Among those who backed the change: Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, one of Manchin’s political heroes.
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