They’ll need money to be reelected

Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported the Senate has begun work on S1, the For the People Act, the bill to preserve voting rights and overturn all the recent GOP state efforts to suppress voting. Moscow Mitch is, of course, spending lots of dark money to campaign against it. One ad praises Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, one of two senators not willing to overturn the filibuster. The other senator is Joe Manchin. Of him McCarter wrote:

Manchin further insists upon giving credence to Trump's Big Lie, insisting that the fact that maybe 25% of the voting public is so gullible or so venal as to say the 2020 election was stolen from Republicans means that Democrats can't save democracy. "January 6 changed me. I never thought in my life, I never read in history books to where our form of government had been attacked, at our seat of government, which is Washington, D.C., at our Capitol, by our own people," Manchin told CNN. But the lesson he got from that was not that we have to combat the ability of a Republican Party intent on propagating the Big Lie that fueled that violence. "So, something told me, 'Wait a minute. Pause. Hit the pause button.' Something's wrong. You can't have this many people split to where they want to go to war with each other." His response is to hand power to the people who stoked that war. Really, this guy has not spent a whole lot of time thinking this out.

McCarter has more on what Mitch said about S1 in this post. In a later post McCarter reported that Biden had a meeting with House and Senate leadership to discuss his big plans. As soon as the meeting was over Kevin McCarthy, House Minority Leader, sent out a campaign text about “Corrupt Joe Biden” and his “radical Socialist agenda.” McCarter reviewed statements from other GOP leadership who say, ain’t no way that bill will pass. That included Ted Cruz saying there are no set of amendments that would prompt for him to vote for S1. Well, maybe if amendments completely gutted it... And Manchin said:

I believe Democrats and Republicans feel very strongly about protecting the ballot boxes allowing people to protect the right to vote.

Yeah, he said that in spite of zero evidence of protecting the vote by Republicans and mountains of evidence of voter suppression in each GOP statehouse to the country. McCarter wrote:

In other words, a few Republicans might be willing to support a bill that essentially does nothing. And now Manchin is fully enabling that tactic. He's telling Republicans that using the Big Lie to destroy democracy is a valid tactic. ... He has officially announced that he is going to oppose the For the People Act, but says instead he will support the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Which Republicans are also going to filibuster. ... Manchin also won't support a limited exception to the filibuster rules to let voting rights legislation pass with a simple majority, which is one possible reform. "If you do it for one time you basically destroy the Senate as we know it," Manchin said. Never mind that the Senate as we know it needs to be destroyed because the likes of Manchin and the Republicans he's enabling are keeping it a white supremacist institution that subverts democracy.

And Manchin also validated the GOP claim of election fraud. Adam Jentleson, who wrote the book on the filibuster, quoted Sahil Kapur of NBC News:

McConnell tells @BretBaier that S1 is toast. “It’s not gonna pass the Senate. There's not a single Republican for it. Sen. Manchin, Sen. Sinema made it clear they're not going to get rid of the legislative filibuster. It would take 60 votes to pass this bill. It will not pass.”

Jentleson added:

McConnell is correct that it will never get 60. Schumer has said that “failure is not an option.” There are a million ways to parse strategy, but at the end of the day it is on POTUS and the Leader to close the deal, as their predecessors did on hard things in their own time.

Manchin opposes S1. It feels like that sinks the bill and with it sinks democracy. Yeah, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says failure of S1 is not an option. Good to hear. So go have a long chat with your pal Joe. Mark Sumner of Kos reported on former Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller in his appearance before the House Oversight Committee. Miller was SecDef during the Capitol Attack and, as Sumner reported, issued a letter on Jan. 4 that restricted what the National Guard was allowed to do on Jan. 6. Sumner wrote:

However, as CNN reports, Miller is expected to say that he was concerned that sending troops to the Capitol would have inflamed the situation. In particular, Miller seemed to be concerned that visible National Guard forces would make the Trump supporters believe that a “military coup” was underway. "I was also cognizant of the fears promulgated by many about the prior use of the military in the June 2020 response to protests near the White House and fears that the President would invoke the Insurrection Act to politicize the military in an anti-democratic manner," writes Miller in his prepared remarks. So Miller seems prepared to testify that he was so concerned about upsetting the Trump supporters with what they might mistake for a coup that he had to allow them to have a coup ... to show there was no coup.

On to a different view of the hearing, this from David Neiwert of Kos. Several GOP members said a lot of words that are all gaslighting: Democrats are making a big deal of nothing. Calling it an insurrection is a boldfaced lie. Fake news had poisoned the well. What about the people who died during the BLM riots? Sumner wrote a second post of Miller’s testimony and the Republican gaslighting. One GOP member said if the media hadn’t labeled it an insurrection, you “would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.” Neiwert reported that the Capitol Police issued a statement saying:

The number of threats made against Congress has increased significantly. This year alone, there has been a 107% increase in threats against Members compared to 2020. Provided the unique threat environment we currently live in, the Department is confident the number of cases will continue to increase.”

After the Capitol attack and more than 100 GOP members refusing to certify the election corporations decided supporting insurrectionists was not a good look. Hunter of Kos reported that a corporate PAC trade association has a webinar for strategies to restart donations to those same insurrectionists. Because those members are still in Congress, they’ll need money to be reelected. The goal of the webinar is about how to make those donations sound not-crooked in their press releases. And be prepared for the tough question of why they are promoting a seditionist with an answer of how that member “supported ten other things that are important to your industry.” Hunter responded:

Oh, well sure. Destabilized the nation, caused multiple deaths, brought democracy itself into question, and proved willing to provide authoritarian-minded propaganda in which hoaxes pulled from Dear Leader's delusional brain are now considered more authoritative than reality itself—but on the other hand, maybe the resulting era of fascist violence will come with tax breaks. Gotta consider all sides.