If they don’t eliminate the filibuster they side with supremacists

The big virus relief package has cleared the House and the Senate, on a vote of 51-50 has agreed to consider it. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported some of the compromises being made to keep conservative Senate Democrats happy, though giving away much more will annoy progressive House Democrats. McCarter also reported Republicans are getting their poison pill amendments ready and coming up with as many ways as possible to muck up and delay much needed relief. And ...

Republicans think they can get "gotcha" moments out of this debate, even when they are attempting to delay wildly popular legislation that gives people money—and, just as important, coronavirus vaccine in their arms before summer. "It's all about TV commercials," Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas told CNN. "Make people accountable for their votes. There is not much they can do if they are determined to hang together there is nothing we can do to change the outcome. If they really want to do this, they can probably get it done." They are still dramatically misreading the moment, thinking they can use the same kind of tactics to poison this bill that they used on Obamacare a decade ago.

A day later McCarter reported that Republicans are still working to be a nuisance. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin is delaying the virus relief bill by demanding the whole bill be read aloud on the floor of the Senate. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he’s delighted the public (already very much in favor of the bill) gets to hear all the details. All that Johnson is going to accomplish is give a few Senate clerks a sore throat, another reason to dislike him. Johnson is also setting up shifts to force amendment votes. The purpose of all this is, of course, delay. Even though it will pass, some benefits from previous relief bills expire on March 14 and if the delay is long enough they could mess up a smooth continuation of such things as unemployment insurance. Republicans like to mess things up. McCarter added that no matter what Republicans do, Democrats are looking out for Republican voters. Stephen Wolf of Kos Elections reported the House has passed the For the People Act, also known as HR 1, a long list of items to make voting easier (and overturn a long list of voter suppression laws that GOP state legislatures are working hard to pass). This posts lists all the pro democracy goodies. And it includes a refrain that has become almost constant – it won’t pass the Senate unless the filibuster is abolished or curtailed. I learned recently that the John Lewis Voting Act is not the same as HR 1. It includes even more voting protections. Sawyer Hackett, advisor to Julian Castro, tweeted:

The VP has to break a tie on a critical relief bill addressing a global pandemic wreaking havoc on our economy. No chance we get to 60 votes on voting rights, democracy reform, immigration, police reform, guns, climate—take your pick. End the filibuster.

Leah McElrath tweeted a link to a list of senators who want to abolish the filibuster and those who want to keep it. McElrath then quoted a tweet from Hackett which quoted a letter from Sen. Krysten Sinema explaining why she wants to keep the filibuster. Hackett wrote:

Sinema says that “retaining the legislative filibuster is not meant to impede the things we want to get done.” Except that’s exactly its function—both when it was created and now.

Historian Kevin Kruse quoted Ari Berman:

Dems can eliminate filibuster to pass HR1 & John Lewis Voting Rights Act to stop GOP voter suppression. Or they can allow GOP to undermine democracy for next decade. Stakes couldn't be higher.

Kruse added:

I’m baffled by the handful of Democrats who think preserving the filibuster is more important than the long term health of our democracy *and* the short term preservation of their own majorities.

Syreeta McFadden tweeted:

*seriously don’t understand how you have the majority and yet govern as if you don’t have the will of the majority*

McCarter explored that letter from Sinema and debunked all her major points, then noted that Sinema left out the filibuster’s white supremacist history. Sinema and Sen. Manchin, the other big filibuster holdout, need to decide if they’re willing to be lumped in with the white supremacists of the pasts and currently in the Senate who want to curtail voting rights. Even if Sinema and Manchin vote for HR 1 and the John Lewis voting rights act, if they don’t vote to eliminate the filibuster they are siding with the supremacists. Spot a theme yet? I’ll add that I have routinely been getting requests to sign this petition or that demanding the end of the filibuster. Various groups ask me to donate so they can continue the campaign against the filibuster. Once the pandemic relief bill is passed everything else Biden and progressive Democrats want to do will depend on making the filibuster disappear or at least have a lot less bite. I’m sure Sinema and Manchin are getting it from all sides. A couple days ago I wrote about a Washington Post article about gutting the filibuster and said I couldn't read it because it is behind a paywall. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted a bit of that article, which is by Norm Ornstein, but not the part about ways to gut the filibuster. Here’s a bit of it:

Manchin hasn’t budged, though. Monday, when asked if he’d reconsider his stance on eliminating the filibuster, he shot back: “Jesus Christ, what don’t you understand about ‘never’?” ... But Democrats should proceed with caution: In 2001, I warned that if Republicans harangued Sen. Jim Jeffords (Vt.) over his apostasy on their party’s policy priorities, they would regret it. He would switch parties and, in a 50-50 Senate, shift the Senate majority. The next month, it happened. The same concern now applies to Democrats with Manchin. Push too far, and the result could be Majority Leader McConnell, foreclosing Democrats’ avenue to pursue infrastructure, tax reform and health reform legislation.

That’s when Ornstein turned to ways to gut the filibuster. Dworkin also quoted Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic about the experiment in Stockton, California to give some poor people a check every month with no demand on how they spend it and no work requirement. Yeah, we used to call it welfare. Not it is called Basic Income. Lowrey wrote:

In the United States, poverty is used as a cudgel to get people to work. We got rid of welfare for poor families’ and poor individuals’ own good, the argument goes. Give people money, and they stop working. They become dependent on welfare. They never sort out the problems in their life. The best route out of poverty is a hand up, not a handout. Stockton has now proved this false. An exclusive new analysis of data from the demonstration project shows that a lack of resources is its own miserable trap. The best way to get people out of poverty is just to get them out of poverty; the best way to offer families more resources is just to offer them more resources.

Lauren Floyd of Kos reported on a study cited in Scientific American that found where Black Lives Matter protests had been staged, police killings dropped about 20% between 2014 and 2019. Because of the protests legislators passed reforms, such as requiring police to wear body cameras. Protests work. I’ve commented a few times about Dominion, a company that makes voting systems, has sued people (like Rudy Giuliani) and companies (like Fox News) for spreading lies that Dominion machines switched votes from the nasty guy to Biden. The real complaint was that Dominion machines did not make black votes disappear in the way their competitor machines could. Dominion filed those suits because those lies have cut into their business. Nick Castele of station WCPN, speaking on NPR, explained how that worked. The bipartisan Board of Elections of Stark County, Ohio (where Canton is) voted unanimously to upgrade their voting machines and chose Dominion. The three top officials of the county, all Republican, got an earful from residents. They had to do a lot of explaining about why they chose the company with a cloud of doubt hanging over it. My friend and debate partner has said several times that the answer to free speech that is dangerous is more free speech in rebuttal. So when John Stoehr tweeted a thread about free speech (promoting an article that covers it in more detail) I had to read it. A mantra Stoehr teaches his undergraduate students is “You can’t get anything done when fascists are sitting at the table of democratic politics.”

A democratic community can tolerate a vast array of opinions. However, it cannot, and should not, tolerate opinions in which democratic politics is the problem. If it does, then nothing needing to get done gets done—and everyone suffers. ... And like most people aligned with Trump, or most people seeing opportunities in that alignment, they pervert reality. Truth is, the sacking and looting of the United States Capitol, which Trump incited, was an attempt to cancel a free and fair democratic election. These fascists did not fight for principles. They fought against democratic politics itself. (Indeed, many of them longed for a United States purified by blood and violence.) ... If the debate over “cancel culture” were restricted to this center-liberal-left spectrum, it might be fruitful. But fascists make democratic debate impossible. Their goal isn’t assessing whether this or that is good or bad. It’s smashing debate altogether. ... To them, what’s important isn’t debating political ideals and public morality. What’s important is dominating democratic discourse for the purpose of putting a stop to it and subsequently replacing it with “The Truth.” ... How do you keep the fascists away from the table of democratic politics? ... We’re not going to keep them away with bans and codes. Those might even backfire. But I do think free speech—importantly, counter-speech!—remains the most effective tool for defending the public arena. The more people are aware of the fascist tactic of suppressing free speech in the name of protecting it, the more people can speak out against the fascists. There’s a lot we can do when the “spectrum of rational politics” stays rational. But to keep the country from going to hell, we have to keep raising hell.

Minnesota Department of Transportation ran a contest to name their snowplows. From 122,000 votes cast they chose eight. Here are my favorites: Darth Blader, Plow Bunyan, Snowbi Wan Kenobi, and F. Salt Fitzgerald.