These are the strands that make up the hope.
-Every other Senate Democrat fell in behind Manchin's alternative.
-McConnell and the Republicans went nuts.
(Those are two confirmations that this is a good idea.)
-Stacey Abrams, the Democrats' leader on voting rights wholeheartedly endorsed the Manchin plan.
(Three confirmations)
-With party unanimity in the Senate Chuck Schumer will begin the process of introducing Manchin's plan and other bills that have the "Magic 50th Vote" (NYT lede)
-All of those bills will fail because of the filibuster.
:(
-Harry Reid did the same thing back in the day to make it squeaky bum time for Republicans on judicial nominations, executive appointments, budget stuff, and there was a run on Imodium in the Republican Caucus and they eventually relented.
-Democrats will do the same thing with their fifty votes and "hope" for the same magic.
-But not really. This is a different Senate and a different GOP. Schumer knows that Republican assholes are sealed tight with Crazy Glue and all will vote against the Manchin plan and the other bills and suffer no embarrassing shit leakage.
-The Democrats only hope--You're saying there's a chance.--is that Manchin and the "handful" of Democratic senators who have squeaky bums on ending or reforming the filibuster will be outraged enough to end the filibuster as we know it.
-McConnell pissed off Manchin in filibustering the Jan. 6 Commission, which did have bipartisan support in the Senate, just not enough to get to sixty votes.
-It's logical to assume, but logic doesn't make it so, that Manchin will be re-pissed off if McConnell gives the filibuster stiff-arm to Manchin's own voting rights plan.
-Pissed off enough to change his Shermanesque written statement of just a couple weeks ago in his state's biggest newspaper that "I will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster"? From where I sit that seems a "forlorn hope" but it's all we got.
I have a question: Could the Democratic senate leadership not pitch Manchin that the filibuster is not a virgin?; that she has already had a few holes opened?; that surgically opening just one other teeny-weeny hole would not "destroy our government”, in fact, just the opposite, ensure that government of the people does not perish from the earth?
