Joe Manchin Has Found A Confusing Reason Not To Back Kamala Harris

Retiring Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) declared on Tuesday he could not endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president because she supported getting rid of the filibuster to pass legislation restoring abortion rights.

“Shame on her,” Manchin told CNN on Tuesday. “She knows the filibuster is the Holy Grail of democracy. It’s the only thing that keeps us talking and working together. If she gets rid of that, then this would be the House on steroids.”

Harris and President Joe Biden have both publicly been in favor of carving out exceptions to the filibuster to restore abortion rights since at least June 2022, making Manchin’s outburst a little late. And former President Donald Trump — the only person besides Harris with a chance of winning the presidency — has also endorsed ending the filibuster.

But Manchin’s explanation for his anger at Harris’ stance runs counter to history.

The filibuster is a loophole in Senate rules that allows senators to speak for a long time on the Senate floor in order to delay or prevent passage of legislation. It’s a de facto 60-vote requirement for passing legislation, since that’s the threshold for ending debate. In short, it’s a workaround to keep the Senate from passing anything under a simple majority.

The case against the filibuster is well-known: It grants the minority party an effective veto over basically all but the most necessary or uncontroversial legislation, further distorting a representative body that’s already massively distorted by differences in population between the states, in which sparse states like Wyoming get equal say with Florida and New York. And it makes it difficult to pass even policies that are massively popular with the public through Congress’ upper chamber.

If you’re Manchin, a moderate from a smaller state who fetishizes bipartisanship, you can argue the filibuster is good for your constituents, or even good for the country as a whole.

But the filibuster is inherently anti-democratic, something that’s been understood since it first came into use in the 1830s. One of the most famous uses of the filibuster was to block the passage of civil rights and voting rights legislation throughout the 20th century, preventing the American South from becoming anything resembling a democracy.

In fact, if the filibuster is truly the “Holy Grail” of democracy, democracies are a lot rarer than we would otherwise believe. Only 13 U.S. states allow the filibuster in their state legislatures. While other advanced democracies throughout the world require supermajority votes for some things — for amending their constitutions, for example — none apply it to all legislation the same way the Senate does.

Right now, Harris’ push to end the filibuster looks unlikely. While she and Trump are locked in a tight presidential race, Republicans are seen as narrow favorites to take over the Senate — in part because Manchin, whose seat is likely to go to a Republican, is not running for reelection. If Republicans take the Senate, there’d be no way for Democrats to end the filibuster, and without ending the filibuster, it’d be essentially impossible for them to enshrine abortion access into law.

But if Democrats win back the House — also seen as a 50/50 proposition — and win the Senate and the presidency, the retirements of Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) mean the party should have the votes to end the filibuster, unless another moderate senator comes out against ending it.

Sinema, a longtime filibuster defender, also chimed in on Harris’ comments. “To state the supremely obvious, eliminating the filibuster to codify Roe v Wade also enables a future Congress to ban all abortion nationwide,” she wrote on social media on Tuesday. “What an absolutely terrible, shortsighted idea.”

There are problems with Sinema’s suggestion — notably, public opinion indicates voters would harshly punish swing-state and swing-district Republicans if they did “vote to ban all abortion nationwide,” providing a quick electoral corrective. But at least she understands all the words she’s using.