…And It’s All Over.

Is it even possible? Have I grown to despise somebody even more intensely than I do Mitch McConnell?

In a series of interviews and op-eds last week, including an extraordinarily ludicrous piece in the Washington Post, Senator Joe Manchin(D-supposedly)(West Virginia) affirmed that under no circumstances would he ever allow anything to happen to the Senate filibuster rule. At the same time, he praised the Constitutional system of allocating two Senators per State, no matter the population, and indicated that he didn’t like the use of the budget reconciliation process to pass anything without Republican support. Moreover, any move to reform voting rights at the federal level had to involve a scheme that Republicans found agreeable. This, he said, is the lesson he draws from the January 6 insurrection.

So that’s it. Manchin, placed by dumb luck in a position to dictate almost all public policy, has decreed that nothing must happen unless it’s with ten Republican votes in the Senate.

That’s still Mitch over there, grinning like a tortoise with a watermelon. There will never be ten Republican votes for anything advanced by the Dems. Never. Not ever. Not for anything. If they introduced a bill to require ten Republican votes for everything, it wouldn’t get ten Republican votes.

So, assuming Manchin sticks to his guns, here, in no particular order, is what’s now out the window:

• Biden’s proposed infrastructure bill
• Immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for the “dreamers”
• A raise to the minimum wage
• A raise in the corporate tax rate
• Any form of gun control
• Anything to address climate change
• Election and voting reform via the For the People and John Lewis Voting Rights Acts
• Any expansion of Obamacare to include a public option
• Police reform
• Statehood for DC and Puerto rico
• Supreme Court reform
• Any other fucking thing of any kind

In signalling the effective end of the Biden presidency barely three months into its first term, Joe said the most extraordinary things. Like:

The filibuster is a critical tool to protecting that input and our democratic form of government. That is why I have said it before and will say it again to remove any shred of doubt: There is no circumstance in which I will vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster. The time has come to end these political games, and to usher a new era of bipartisanship where we find common ground on the major policy debates facing our nation.

And:

It’s no accident that a state as small as West Virginia has the same number of senators as California or Texas. It goes to the heart of what representative government is all about. The Founding Fathers understood that the challenges facing a rural or small state would always be very different from a more populous state. Designating each state with the same number of senators — regardless of the population — ensured that rural and small states and the Americans who live in them would always have a seat at the table.

And:

I simply do not believe budget reconciliation should replace regular order in the Senate. How is that good for the future of this nation? Senate Democrats must avoid the temptation to abandon our Republican colleagues on important national issues. Republicans, however, have a responsibility to stop saying no, and participate in finding real compromise with Democrats.

Not to overlook:

The only thing I would caution anybody and everybody about is that we had an insurrection on January 6, because of voting, right? And lack of trust in voting…We should not, at all, attempt to do anything that would create more distrust and division.

It’s hard to know where to start with such a rich tapestry of dumbfuckery. Should one begin by pointing out that his beloved filibuster is not part of the constitutional design, but rather runs counter to it, and arose only as an unintended artifact of an ill-considered rule change? Is it necessary to add that the 60 vote rule has in the past been used mainly to thwart civil rights legislation, until Mitch turned it into a tool of general application to stop all legislation of any sort? Do we remind him that bipartisan comity was rendered stone dead by Newt Gingrich and the Freedom Caucus starting about 30 years ago, and will never be back with a Republican Party as presently constituted? Or how about the two-Senators-per-State thing – do we explain to him that this was a measure vehemently opposed by Hamilton and Madison as being undemocratic, and was a concession extorted by the smaller States as the price of their agreeing to participate in the Constitutional Convention that replaced the defective Articles of Confederation with the document that he knows so little about? Should we quote Hamilton himself on the topic? Can we suggest to him that continuing down the path to allowing 30% of the country to get 70% of the Senate seats is an untenable way to govern, and amounts these days to nothing but the tyranny over the diverse urban majority by a small, Caucasian minority of backwards-assed country fucks? Do we stress that when it comes to voting reform, the Republicans will never agree to anything that smacks of genuine representative democracy, since they and theirs are currently on a 47 State bender to gerrymander the living shit out of the whole country while suppressing non-white voting, the better to cement the minority rule that will soon deprive Joe and his party of any future chance to effect any sort of worthwhile change? Do we ask him why, in the name of all that’s holy, his response to an insurrection supported and indeed incited by his friends across the aisle is to appease the bastards and not do anything that would annoy them? Do we explain that the only reason there’s any lack of public trust in the voting process is because of ceaseless and insidious Republican lies about non-existent voter fraud?

No, actually. We don’t bother with any of that, because Manchin is too leather-headed, and too drunk on his newfound accidental power, to understand or care.

So there it goes. Maybe the last great opportunity to fix a few of the many things that are horribly broken in America. So, yeah, I guess the impossible has happened. I do despise this idiot even more than McConnell. At least Mitch doesn’t put a “D” after his name. Neither should Manchin. Schumer should expel him from caucus. He’s no Democrat, and he’s no damned good to us.

The stupid, stupid bastard.