Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) during a Senate vote at the Capitol, March 25, 2021
Good thing Joe Manchin’s not a diagnostician, as the man can’t tell cause from effect, causation from correlation. Had he been heading the CDC over the past year, he doubtless would have concluded that, since COVID-19 and the proliferation of face masks emerged at roughly the same time, it was the masks that caused the pandemic.
Consider, as a fair sample of his reasoning capacities, his defense of the filibuster in an op-ed he penned in today’s Washington Post:
Every time the Senate voted to weaken the filibuster in the past decade, the political dysfunction and gridlock have grown more severe. The political games playing out in the halls of Congress only fuel the hateful rhetoric and violence we see across our country right now.
This analysis has it precisely backward. During the Obama presidency, for instance, the Senate eliminated the filibuster on a president’s executive branch appointments because a gridlocked Senate—the result of near-unified Republican opposition to any Obama initiative—used the 60-vote threshold to block any number of appointments. The filibuster was, and is, an effect of polarization, not its cause. If Manchin actually could discern the difference, he’d note that the steady rightward gallop of the GOP has eliminated the middle ground on which bipartisanship could sometimes take root. (Don’t take my word for it; take John Boehner’s.) And that rightward gallop has been spurred not by the filibuster, but by the growth of counterfactual right-wing media; the even more counterfactual right-wing social media; the counterfactual presidency of Donald Trump; and the growing racial, gender, religious, and cultural intolerance within the Republican base, fearful of the decline of white male Christian traditionalist hegemony, and the apocalyptic stoking of those fears by Republican pols and media.
Ironically, Manchin’s opposition to axing the filibuster comes at the very moment that President Biden has put before Congress proposals—the COVID stimulus, the infrastructure and progressive tax hike bills—that poll well across party lines with actual Americans, but that congressional Republicans, in obeisance to the GOP’s rabid base and equally rabid far-right media, have uniformly opposed, either by vote (the COVID stimulus) or in word (the bills yet to be voted on). Given a chance to begin to create at least a patch of the middle ground he claims he wishes to nurture, Manchin actually will stomp it out of existence if he continues to uphold the filibuster.
How, then, do we diagnose Manchin’s Ailment? Failure of intellect? Not entirely. Deliberate misreading of history? We’re getting warmer. Putting his own political needs as a Democrat from a deeply Republican state over those of the nation? Bull’s-eye! What Manchin touts as his centrism is really a severe case of narcissism.
