Manchin: The Fall Guy
Manchin and Sinema — taking the fall for a corrupt establishment?
This Monday’s look at last week’s news is kind of about Manchin, but not really.
The corporate media and Democratic leadership have turned Manchin into the fall guy. I’ve done it too at times. But it’s becoming clearer and clearer that Manchin is just the public-facing stooge of a larger corrupt contingent of the Democratic Party that doesn’t want to do the things the voters elected them to do.
Yes, we know that there’s another high-profile Democratic Senator — Kyrsten Sinema — who openly opposes key parts of Biden’s agenda and legislation from the Democrats. Reuters painted Sinema’s appearance with the US Chamber of Commerce in April as a way to be rewarded with campaign contributions thanks to her opposing Biden’s agenda, which is weak enough as it is to begin with. We know the corruption is strong with Manchin and Sinema.
But it’s not just these two. Washington Post and Politico have both reported that there are about 10 centrist Democrats who are privately happy that Manchin’s willing to essentially take the fall for all of them so that they don’t have to publicly oppose Biden, reforming the filibuster, or the Democrats’ progressive-ish agenda. That might explain in part why Biden is caving before even negotiating with Republicans. He’s not caving just to Republicans — maybe he’s caving to a small contingent in his own party.
Then there are the cute moves that establishment Dems are trying to use (here’s my post with a Bingo card of some of them!) — most recently for the vote on advancing the Payment Fairness Act going down 49-50 in the Senate.
But wait — you protest — Democrats have 50 Senators! Well, Kirsten Gillibrand didn’t vote on it, which wasn’t widely reported in the media (I found out about it on TYT, although I see some other articles like this one from the WSJ mention it). They chose to go ahead with the vote anyway.
Why? Of course, since Democrats won’t get rid of the filibuster, it would need 60 votes. Maybe we’re supposed to think, ah shucks, even if we eliminated or reformed the filibuster, which we don’t want to do anyway, it wouldn’t have passed?
They can’t even get 50 votes on something they know is going to fail!
There doesn’t seem to be much hope of anything meaningful and lasting passing before the midterm elections next year, Manchin or no Manchin. And I don’t even want to think about what those elections will look like if Democrats don’t do a damn thing to not just put bandaids on things, but make the fundamental change Biden and his corrupt friends seem intent on opposing.
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