A Tale of Two Rebels
Terry H. Schwadron
May 13, 2021
One party is throwing a leader out over conscience, while the other is pampering its solo holdout vote.
Even as House Republicans were moving to push out Rep. Liz Cheney yesterday from her party leadership role over her repeated challenges of Donald Trump’s election lies, Democrats in the Senate were still talking in hushed tones to Sen. Joe Manchin, D-VWa., about his missing support for voter rights legislation.
Make no mistake, the Republican ouster of Cheney will resound for years as a rejection of small-d democratic values, as a rejection of truth-telling, as a marker in the downward spiral of American politics and a spur to third-party politics. For Republicans, a voice of conscience needs to be, um, canceled. For Democrats, why isn’t the same true?
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your contemporary Republican Party, where today there is no greater offense than honesty,” argued former Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona in an Washington Post op-ed decrying the decision that no doubt will end her political career.
Manchin’s announced opposition to voting rights legislation has drawn plenty of commentaries questioning Democrat Manchin’s opinions on the issues of the day, but none calling for him to be ousted. Of course, Manchin has yet to organize an insurrection attack on the U.S. Capitol or to seek to figurative tear up the Constitution. He just has bad ideas.
The Lines over Voting Rights
The debate over S.1, the big voter rights bill that has a House equivalent, is real and palpable, on Tuesday even pitting Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in pretty assaultive, verbal combat before the Senate Rules Committee for “mark-up” or consideration of amendments over a bill that would override the current wave of voter suppression laws being passed in Republican-majority states.
It is hard to overstate the weird aspects of the debate.
Actually Cheney, who denounces Trump for the Big Lie over claiming election fraud, actually opposes the House version of this bill, in accord with her usual politically conservative roots. And it is Manchin, whose party defines the bill as the very essence of a vote as needed to guarantee one-person, one-vote democracy itself, is the only undeclared Democrat.
Still, no one is talking about throwing Manchin out of the Democratic Party for having a conscience, though it does stretch the imagination to understand why he wouldn’t want to guarantee that rural or majority Black voting areas had access to votes without standing in line for hours at a time.
Indeed, Democrats seem to be going out of their way to bend to accommodate Manchin’s reluctance on a host of issues.
The debating gold star this week probably went to Sen. Ted Cruz, a repeat winner of this never-coveted honor, for suggesting to reporters the inside-out argument that guaranteeing voter rights as this bill seeks to do was bringing back “Jim Crow” laws. When it was pointed out to him that Jim Crow laws were those that kept Black citizens from voting, Cruz noted passing S.1 would keep people from voting Democrats out of office. Um, weird.
Topping it, at one point when the chamber was nearly empty, Sen. Angus King, I-Me, referred to the string of proposed Republican amendments, and asked Cruz, “If this amendment and others that you suggest are accepted, would you vote for the bill?” Cruz responded essentially no. “To be candid, it is difficult to imagine a set of amendments being adopted that would cause me to vote for this bill — it would have to be a fundamentally different bill. . . That being said, each of these amendments is a designed to strike out egregious aspects of this bill, so if some of these amendments were adopted, it might conceivably convince some Republicans to support it, if it ceased being a partisan power grab.”
At least Republicans don’t want to throw him out of office.
Where We Are
As The Washington Post noted, the takeaway of the debate is that anything that gets more people registered, makes voting easier, reduces gerrymandering, limits voter purges, or tries to reveal who’s behind “dark money” — all provisions of the bill — is seen by Republicans as helping Democrats and therefore completely unacceptable.
This is important, because at the heart of Manchin’s non-committal is insistence that legislation be bipartisan, that a bill that can get some Republican support after even substantial compromise is automatically better than one that gets forced through — even at the cost of killing the filibuster tradition.
Manchin might be influential if his argument is about infrastructure spending, but clearly is in the wrong in a vote essentially about whether we support the idea that all Americans should be allowed to vote.
The Rules Committee is split 9–9, the result of a Senate organizing resolution near the beginning of the current session. The committee cannot adopt tied amendments, and all but one — for a study among military voters — was tied.
The main vote will happen on the Senate floor sometime soon — if Senator Manchin can locate his conscience.
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