Politics
Joe Manchin said he can’t endorse Kamala Harris. His reason is terrible.
Sen. Joe ManchinI-W.V., has announced he won’t be endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president. Unfortunately, he’s refraining from backing her for a truly unfortunate reason.
While earlier this month Manchin seemed to hint that he’d consider endorsing Harris, he said on Tuesday that he had decided against it because of her call for ending the filibuster to pass federal legislation protecting abortion rights.
The filibuster has effectively become a way for the minority party in the Senate to thwart simple majority rule.
“Shame on her,” he told CNN. “She knows the filibuster is the Holy Grail of democracy. It’s the only thing that keeps us talking and working together. If she gets rid of that, then this would be the House on steroids.”
He continued: “I think that basically can destroy our country, and my country is more important to me than any one person or any one person’s ideology. … I think it’s the most horrible thing.”
Manchin’s announcement was peculiar in that Harris has called for modifying the filibuster in order to pass abortion rights (and voting rights legislation) for years. Why is he focusing on this now? Manchin told BLN that he had hoped that as a Democratic presidential candidate she might reverse course on that position, but when she called for eliminating “the filibuster for Roe” during a recent interview with Wisconsin Public Radio he decided that he could no longer consider endorsing her.
But on a more substantive level, Manchin’s conception of the filibuster as “the Holy Grail” of democracy is, well, perplexing.
The bedrock principles of democracy are popular representation and majority rule. The filibuster, however, has effectively become a way for the minority party in the Senate to thwart simple majority rule. It is an idiosyncratic procedural tool designed to delay or block a vote on a bill. While, theoretically, the filibuster could be used to encourage broader consensus on particularly big and thorny issues, in modern times it has effectively become a burdensome 60-vote supermajority threshold for passing all legislation, and a bottleneck that kills most significant bills and makes major reforms virtually impossible.
What makes the filibuster even worse is that it is used in a legislative body that already shuns the principle of popular representation and disenfranchises millions of Americans because it overrepresents certain communities (people in small states and rural areas), while essentially making the votes of people in more populated states and areas count less. In other words, Manchin’s democratic “Holy Grail” is in fact a way for minority parties in a minoritarian institution to hold the governing party hostage.
Manchin and many other advocates for the filibuster use language that can imply that the filibuster was part of the foundational vision for American democratic life.
It was not. The filibuster is not in the Constitution, and it was not some key part of the Founding Fathers’ vision for America. (Some scholars have even argued that it is unconstitutional.) As the political scientist Sarah Binder has pointed out, the filibuster was an accidental byproduct of an attempt to simplify rules about cutting off debate in the Senate in the early 19th century. One indicator that it wasn’t deliberate is that the first live filibusters didn’t take place until decades after the rule change that allowed them to even emerge as a legislative strategy; it was discovered as a way to block legislation by creative lawmakers.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., piled onto Harris with a post on X saying that eliminating the filibuster to pass abortion rights was a “an absolutely terrible” idea because “eliminating the filibuster to codify Roe v. Wade also enables a future Congress to ban all abortion nationwide.”
Sinema is right that the elimination of the filibuster could cut both ways. But most Republicans — including former President Donald Trump — know that seeking a federal elimination of abortion rights could be an extinction-level event for Republicans in federal office. Moreover, if Democrats succeed at enshrining abortion protections in the law, it will become far more politically toxic for Republicans to seek their removal, since it is easier politically to defend widely used rights and services than it is to dismantle them. (Consider, for example, the resilience of Obamacare; as flawed as it is, Democrats have succeeded in mobilizing voters against the GOP based on the argument that Republicans want to eliminate it.)
But Manchin shouldn’t have to agree with all my points about the filibuster to see how he’s lost sight of the bigger picture about drawing lines in the sand over American democracy.
There are only two candidates with a chance of winning on Election Day. One of them has committed to abiding by the results of the election, the other has not. We can debate the trade-offs of filibuster reform, and filibuster reform can itself be rolled back. But there is no debate to be had about accepting vote counts, and it’s a lot harder for America to come back from a potential second coup attempt in two elections. Manchin’s rhetoric about Harris undermining American democracy looks mighty short-sighted in light of the clear and present danger that Trump poses to it.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for BLN Daily. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Blue Light News, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter here.
‘We are winning elections’: Bernie Sanders on Democrats’ progressive wing
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Politics
Trump wants the Postal Service to radically overhaul mail voting. But ballots are already going out.
President Donald Trump’s controversial demands for the Postal Service to overhaul and monitor millions of mail ballots hit another snag on Friday, when North Carolina became the first state in the nation to start sending out ballots for the November election.
In March, Trump signed the initial executive order, which aimed to crack down on mail-in voting — which he regularly alleges without evidence is a vector for widespread voter fraud — and assert an unprecedented amount of federal control over the upcoming elections.
Under this order and the subsequent rule drafted by the U.S. Postal Service, the USPS would refuse to deliver ballots to states that failed to provide lists of eligible mail voters or did not adhere to an approved envelope design style.
Since then, the order has faced legal challenges, and it remains paused by a federal judge’s orders. But the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to allow the new rule to proceed — something current and former election officials from both parties say would be both a legal nightmare that oversteps the federal government’s traditional role in elections and a logistical one that is happening far too close to the November election to implement even if they agreed with it.
“Why the hell are you rocking the boat this late in the game?” said Stephen Richer, a former Republican recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, who has clashed with Trump allies for defending the security of the 2020 election.
Still, election officials are trying to project a sense of normalcy for voters, particularly in North Carolina, which serves as a test of whether established local election systems can operate normally amid intensifying federal scrutiny.
“I want to emphasize this point because there has been a lot of outside noise: Our county workers are ready,” Sam Hayes, a longtime Republican lawyer in the state and now executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, said in a Thursday afternoon press conference.
He added, “All we can do is what we’re doing. … It is business as usual as far as I’m concerned.”
Despite the legal challenges, the Trump administration has continued to press the courts to let it proceed. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to lift an order from a Massachusetts judge which temporarily prevents the USPS from enforcing their rule. It is the second time the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to step in, after winning an earlier victory in which the high court dismissed an earlier hold on the rule as premature.
“The uncertainty is coming from a single activist judge who continues to try and obstruct President Trump from implementing commonsense measures to protect the security of mail-in ballots and ensure only Americans vote in American elections,” White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement. “These safeguards for mail ballots were proposed months ago giving election officials ample time to prepare for the 2026 election.”
The USPS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Election officials said that if the rule goes into effect this close to November, it would cause chaos and place added strain on the USPS and election officials. And an anonymous federal whistleblower said in a report circulated earlier this week by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) that the USPS was moving forward in a “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed process” to try to implement the new system ahead of the midterms.
In the coming weeks, states across the country will follow North Carolina’s lead. Nine other states will begin mailing ballots in the next two weeks, according to a tracker from the National Conference of State Legislatures — with the biggest day for mailing coming 45 days before the election in mid-September.
“It would be so outrageous to try to let this go into effect. It’s hard to even imagine,” said Ben Hovland, a senior fellow for democracy at the progressive think tank Center for American Progress and former Democratic commissioner with the Election Assistance Commission who was fired by Trump in July.
He added, “It would be a break-glass moment for our democracy.”
The rule would require meticulous changes to ballot handling and tracking practices that Hovland said are impossible to implement before Election Day in about two months, effectively disenfranchising millions of voters.
“Ballots are printed. Envelopes are printed. You can go on and on with all the practical reasons that show that implementing something like this at this time is not feasible,” he said.
Richer said he doubted the new rules would bring about more security. Even if the USPS received lists from the states, according to the postal service’s final rule, it would not do any additional vetting of the list, Richer said.
“It’s just that the mail ballots have to be on that list, and I don’t see what added value for election integrity that does,” he said.
He added, “It creates a lot of administrative burden, and I think it creates a lot more opportunity for error.”
While a decision looms in the courts, election officials and experts cast doubt on the likelihood of the rules going into effect before November. A more pressing issue, they said, is the confusion and uncertainty surrounding mail-in ballots, which could subvert and change the behaviors of voters.
“It makes things seem messy or difficult, and it can dissuade people from participating or coming out to vote,” Hovland said. “It certainly also helps establish a pretext to make bad faith claims about election results.”
Hovland said that while none of these claims of voter fraud are backed up with facts, they could cause Americans to lose faith in the voting process.
Still, some current officials contended they were well-prepared for whatever happens — and that they’d be able to communicate effectively with voters who have become increasingly buffeted by dramatic rhetoric about the once-unmentioned nuts and bolts of actually running an election.
“There’s always a lot of noise around elections, that’s not going to change, and it can be hard to differentiate that from what’s actually going on on the ground,” said Jason Tyson, director of external affairs for the North Carolina State Board of Elections.
As Election Day approaches, Tyson and election officials said they urge voters to check their registration status and make a plan to vote.
He added, “I think we’ve got a really well-trained, solid staff who are ready, and who have gone through all of the checks and balances and points of contact that we need to do to get to where we are.”
Missouri’s Supreme Court suspended a congressional map that state Republicans drew last year that would have netted the GOP an additional House seat, likely keeping the seat in Democratic hands this November.
The court ruled unanimously on Thursday that a referendum petition organized by Democrats to put the new congressional maps to a vote was incorrectly deemed insufficient by Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, and ordered that the gerrymandered map be put to a vote in the fall.
Voters will ultimately decide the fate of the new lines in November. But in the meantime, it cannot be in place for the midterms, meaning Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s original Kansas City-based district will likely stay in Democrats’ hands this fall.
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