OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
West Virginia Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin is slamming President Joe Biden and Democrats for being too one-sided, saying they “started wrong” and that Biden is going in the wrong direction by being “too partisan.”
“We started wrong, And I think that Joe Biden’s advisers have led him wrong to start out in a strictly partisan direction,” Manchin began. “We should have found something that we could have voted on bipartisan first and then gone down this lane when we hit a roadblock, and they didn’t do that, but that’s fine, we’re going to start this, I’m determined to make it bipartisan because if we go off the rails and there’s no bipartisan, you ain’t coming back for two years.”
Manchin also vowed to defend the Byrd rule, which restricts the kinds of provisions that can be rammed through with reconciliation.
“If they think they want to jam things down people’s throat? No,” Manchin said. “If we can’t get one or two or three Republicans to vote with things that we should be doing in a bipartisan [way] … I’m not going down that path and destroy this place. I’m not going to let the Byrd rule be decimated.”
Manchin, one of the only moderate Democrats in the party, has also stated that he will not let his party eliminate the filibuster in order to ram through Biden’s leftist agenda.
Another moderate Democrat recently angered the Left.
Arizona Democrat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is not backing down on her support of the Senate filibuster and it’s not sitting well with Democrats. The well-known Democrat said she supports keeping the filibuster because it “protects the democracy of our nation.”
“As folks in Arizona know, I’ve long been a supporter of the filibuster because it is a tool that protects the democracy of our nation, rather than allowing our country to ricochet wildly every two to four years back and forth between policies,” Sinema said.
“The idea of the filibuster was created by those who came before us in the United States Senate to create comity and to encourage senators to find bipartisanship and work together. And while there are some who don’t believe that bipartisanship is possible, I think that I’m a daily example that bipartisanship is possible, not just this trip today and tomorrow that John and I are doing, but the work that John and I, and I and many other of my colleagues in both parties do on a regular basis,” she continued.
She added: “So to those who say we must make a choice between the filibuster and x, I say this is a false choice. The reality is, is that when you have a system that’s not working effectively, and I would think that most would agree that the Senate is not a particularly well-oiled machine, right, the way to fix that is to change your behavior, not to eliminate the rules or change the rules, but to change your behavior. So I’m going to continue to go to work every day, aggressively seeking bipartisanship in a cheerful and happy warrior way as I always do, and showing that when we work together we can get things done.”
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“The filibuster was not created as a tool to accomplish one thing or another. It was created as a tool to bring together members of different parties to find compromise and a coalition,” Sinema said.
“And you think about our Founding Fathers when they created the Senate with two senators from every state regardless of population size, with elections staggered every six years so that only a third of the body is up for election each cycle, it was designed to be a place where you cool the passions of the House. We work together to find a compromise, and importantly, where you protect the rights of the minority from the majority regardless of which party is in the majority at the time,” she added.
The Senate filibuster is a rule that requires 60 members to end debate on most topics and move to a vote.
