If he was his replacement we’d be fully fully fucked dude… and he’s going to get reelected again because the derps in his state think he’s one of the good ones and because he’s a senior member of the political machine that runs the state.
You want to get mad at someone get mad at the people who lost winnable races to GOP politicians and made Manchin and Sinema absolutely mandatory yes votes. Manchin would like to vote no more than he’s going to get to this next couple of years I’m quite sure.
Demonize Sinema all you want her VORP is for sure negative. The Democrats could have run a candidate other than Chamber of Commerce Barbie and won in AZ ffs.
Be mad at all of them and be mad at Manchin because this is a battle for democracy and his seat in WV doesn’t mean shit in the grand scheme of things. Not to mention he has talked about this being his last term anyways.
When you’re looking down the barrel of decades of inequality accelerating, climate change exploding, fascism rising, everyone who isn’t doing everything to stop it deserves blame.
How can you possibly say it doesn’t mean shit in the grand scheme of things when it’s already prevented as much pain and suffering as it has? This is just completely insane. Usually I totally agree with your takes but this one is just weird.
Manchin is doing quite a bit more to stop it than anyone else in the Senate because he’s so far managed to steal 14 senate years from the GOP. Something VERY important with how badly rigged that body is. You know who else has stolen 14 Senate years from the GOP? Nobody. Not even close.
I think the next minimum wage push should be more aggressive. $15 is still too low, and whatever target is set will be delayed and “debated” for many years. We need something like a “$30 by 2030” campaign.
You’re looking at the past and present, you gotta look at the future. Now calculate the pain that will happen if HR1 isn’t passed. His seat will be canceled out by Dems having zero chance in GA, in fact he will be -1. Then you factor in AZ, all the other senate seats, all the house seats they will lose.
Going forward, in the grand scheme of things, sacrificing his seat would be MASSIVELY +EV if we pass HR1. If we don’t pass HR1, dems having 46 senators instead of 45 won’t really matter much.
Like I said, I agree he is #1 VORP, but in a zero sum political game where 2022 is the ball game, that no longer matters,
So yeah he played the game well, he was one of the best players on the team, maybe the best, but he’s about to throw an interception with 1 minute left on the clock in a tie game when he should run the ball and set up the FG.
That’s how I see it anyways, maybe I’m wrong and somehow dems are fine without HR1.
He’s been on the record on both sides of HR1. He’s going to force some concession that probably don’t matter that much big picture (like not doing DC statehood) and then vote for it along with Sinema who pretty much has a gun to her head on it.
This is the dance he does. I get that it’s annoying in the extreme, but in context it’s more than forgivable.
This is a succinct summary of what I was trying to say.
Even if we ignore the literal disenfranchisement of nearly a million people who are majority minority, this would be a massive own goal by the Democrats and I would not forgive Joe Manchin for this. It is both the right thing to do from a politics / game theory perspective and the massively right thing to do from a democracy perspective.
I totally agree in a vacuum… but in terms of the hard numbers of political power the Senate would still be gerrymandered to fuck and the house votes wouldn’t matter. I care about our Democracy surviving, and if you want to blame Manchin for doing what he feels he needs to do to appease his frankly very racist voters you’re blaming the wrong person. I would MUCH prefer to have a 52-48 Senate where Manchin could performatively vote against a better version of HR1. I wish we had a 15 dollar minimum wage right now too, but we lost winnable races and here we are.
HR1 isn’t passing. At least not in anything resembling it’s current form.
I see the vast majority of people in real life and some here assuming things are all better because we got rid of Trump but in reality the odds it doesn’t get much worse from here seems very low. GOP controlled states will have literal rigged elections going forward. 2022 will be a crushing defeat for Dems as a result. Protests will ensue. Murdering the protestors with your F250 is legal now and some will do it.
Someone talk me down from this because I think this is the most likely series of events. GOP getting back control of the Federal government results in similar shit they are passing at the state level at the Federal level. It’s hard to see that not after 2024. Then it’s ballgame.
Not believing that is what is going to happen requires not believing that Manchin and the GOP are serious about what they are saying they will do out loud.
Dems aren’t fine without HR1, but neither are they hopeless in 2022 without it. Not passing it doesn’t lead to a guaranteed loss of control of Congress or even of just the Senate.
This is where we disagree. If I thought HR1 was still going to pass I would be fine with his games, I don’t and so I’m not.
Yeah if Manchin stuck to his talking filibuster stuff and left Cinema as the lone vote against it I think she crumbles from the pressure, but he is now forming a coalition with her and it will be much easier for her to stick to her guns with Manchin talking the way he is.
I really dont see Manchin supporting the filibuster or some sort of modified filibuster to pass HR-1. I agree he’s going to dance around and then vote for some sort of reconciliation based infrastructure package with some concessions that are annoying but still allow for a good bill. His language seems very different to me on things like COVID relief and infrastructure than it does on the filibuster or passing HR-1 on a 50-50 tiebreak. Obviously I hope to be wrong, but I really think you guys are too optimistic here.
I think that Democrats under-performed due to COVID in two ways. One is that they shut down the ground game and going door to door. The other is that I believe there was a bloc of single issue anti-maskers who would have sat out the election if there hadn’t been a pandemic. The latter is still a theory of mine that hasn’t been supported or ruled out by any data I’ve seen.
So, I have reasonable hopes that they have avenues to improve that can compensate for voter suppression laws.
