Mascot of obstructionism

Yesterday I looked at Michigan’s coronavirus data based on what the state released on Friday. New cases per day hit a peak above 8300 this week. Last week was revised downward and the two weeks before were revised upward. That gives the appearance of larger jump in mid March and a slower rise (but still a rise) since then. This is still about 1400 below the peak in November. The deaths per day for last week was revised upward so many days were above 40 and one day at 49. The data I get does not show hospitalizations. The news reports this week said that in Michigan the number of people in the hospital for COVID exceeds the peak in November. And still the governor won’t mandate the CDC recommendations. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer spoke to fellow Democrats, laying out their plan of action. As part of that he asked them to find Republican partners willing to work with them on bipartisan priorities. The reason is so they understand the extent to which Republicans intend to obstruct Democratic bills. It would show voters that at least Democrats tried. It would also hopefully demonstrate to Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema that without eliminating the filibuster nothing needing GOP votes will get done. Moscow Mitch also is telling his caucus about Manchen and Sinema. As in instructing his colleagues to butter them up, play really nice, in hopes they’ll thwart Democratic bills and keep the filibuster intact. As the big pandemic relief bill was being pushed through the Senate in March Manchin made a big deal of his demand of reducing the size of unemployment benefits and cutting off payments a month earlier than was approved by the House. McCarter quoted a bit from Politico, saying that Rob Portman (R-OH), by being best buds with Manchin was able to get Manchin to do GOP bidding. It slowed down a few of the more “radical” Democratic goals. Because of Manchin’s obstruction to democracy the women of Gaslit Nation decided it was time to look more closely at him. The women are Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. This episode is titled Joe Manchin Gaslights America. Kendzior began:

Yes, we no longer have a Kremlin asset mobbed up sociopath plague fiend and nuke fetishist as the president, but we still have his criminal backers running around free. As we've long stated on Gaslit Nation, it's the operators behind the scenes—the oligarchs, the mafias, the blood and money drenched right-wing fanatics—who are the true source of control over the American body politic. Getting rid of Trump did not get rid of the core problems, much as his win did not create them. Elite criminal impunity remains the scourge of this country.

Biden and his FBI are ignoring the crimes of the attack on the Capitol. The profiteering over the pandemic. The hijacking and dismantling of our government. The mass abuse of migrant children. And many more. Inaction is inexcusable because there is so little time to act. Biden doesn’t have four years to fix this. He has two. That’s because of the GOP attack on voting rights. That attack could be enough to flip the House and end any hope of reform. For too long Democratic politics has focused on “vote them out next time.” I heard a lot of that over the last two years. But with the current GOP actions there won’t be a next time. Democratic inaction has been full of excuses. For the past two years it has been why show any initiative if Moscow Mitch will block it? Now the excuse is Joe Manchin, who has embraced his role of “mascot of obstructionism.” But appeasement didn’t stop Nazis. And the Senate wasn’t envisioned to be an obstructionist body. Chalupa reviewed the filibuster and its use to protect the oppression of black people. She then talked about conservative justices and that 79% of their decisions on voting rights restricted access to the ballot. The judiciary “are the cage bars of any struggling democracy.” Then there was a discussion of gerrymandering, which I’ve discussed many times. District boundaries are about to be drawn again – based on a census carried out under the nasty guy. And this gerrymandering will be what flips the House – before a vote is cast. And under a GOP House the attack on people of color will escalate. We need to protect people of color. To stop that we need to immediately end the filibuster, pass voting reforms, big climate change legislation, health care reform, and predatory financial corruption. All of them primarily people of color. There is no time to waste. Chalupa said:

All these casual state killings of People of Color, that's not normal, it's dystopian. If this was happening in any other country, tourism would plummet, Western leaders would pass sanctions. Every latest murder adds to the state-sanctioned trauma impacting all communities of color who have to raise their children under the constant threat of White supremacy violence. ... White supremacy has already laid the groundwork to steal the 2022 election from you, and once they do, we may never get our democracy back—not without a generation or two of martyrs sacrificing their lives and freedom, like the people are doing right now in Belarus and Ukraine and in Russia—and those generations in America will look back on Biden, Pelosi and Schumer as those who could have done more when they had the chance, but failed to treat the decline of our democracy as an urgent crisis.

Kendzior said:

We are at a turning point. Within this turning point, you cannot have one individual like Joe Manchin be the node upon which democracy or autocracy triumphs. It's absolutely absurd. It's absurd that it's not called out more. It's absurd that he's not investigated more as to what exactly is motivating his behavior. ... Manchin is a weird one, because he seems just so vacuous. He's like an enigma wrapped in a riddle, wrapped in a lot of money.

So Kendzior went digging into the guy’s background. Manchin has said he doesn’t care if he wins or loses an election. He doesn’t care about his job. Governing is not the point. His refusal to get rid of the filibuster means no voting rights, which would cost him his Senate seat. He likes to define himself as a “centrist.” Kendzior said, “It is impossible to be a ‘centrist’ when the other party is an authoritarian cult. You are merely a cult enabler, one far more to the right than you present yourself as being.” Manchin voted for many of the nasty guy’s most destructive nominees, including Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court. Manchin has been a welcome guest at dinners with the pandemic prince and princess. He was a backer of the plot that got Michael Flynn in trouble in 2017 (Kendzior provided details). He supported the nasty guy’s efforts in Israel before Obama was out of office. He voted against the 2015 Iran Deal. He seems fond of other autocratic regimes, such as the King of Syria. In foreign affairs he seems to like everything the nasty guy liked. Is he compromised? No evidence. Which is why Manchin is an enigma. But he needs to be investigated. Chalupa said:

I don't think Manchin is ever going to budge. I think his whole purpose is to wait out the clock until 2022 under this gaslighting campaign of being bipartisan, and that way, nothing gets done and his cronies—his fellow warriors of whiteness—this corruption culture that he lives and breathes, of all these weird connections, they're going to be back in power and they're going to thrive. ... Things will get very, very dark if Democratic leadership doesn't yank Joe Manchin in line, for the literal sake of humanity. I want to point out that, on top of all this, Joe Manchin is a living embodiment of what we say—that White supremacy endangers all of us. He is a living, breathing monument to Neo-confederacy by blocking filibuster reform.

Biden entered office facing for crises: COVID-19, climate change, racial justice and the economy. Chalupa quoted filibuster expert Adam Jentleson in The Atlantic:

A fifth crisis will determine the fate of the rest of his administration, and perhaps that of American democracy itself: the minority rule doom loop, by which predominantly White conservatives gain more and more power, even as they represent fewer Americans. The doom loop consists of four interlocking components; candidates who represent White conservatives; Republicans in our ideologically sorted era begin every election cycle buoyed by voter suppression and gerrymandering—what I call electoral warfare—which makes it easier for them to win; then, anti-democratic features of the American system that have always existed, but never benefited one party over the other in any systematic way, help those same candidates take control of institutions, such as the White House and the Senate, despite winning fewer votes and representing fewer people than their opponents. Once in control of these institutions, these newly elected officials use them to entrench their power beyond the reach of voters. If they are eventually voted out of power, they retain a veto over the agenda of the majority, which they use to block change and feed the conservative case that the government is broken. This hastens their return to power along the very path they greased with voter suppression. The net effect of this doom loop is a growing divergence between the agenda of the government and the will of the governed, an untenable dynamic in any democracy. With Democratic control of Congress hanging by a handful of seats, the next two years might be the country's last chance to stop this cycle.

Kendzior said about this takeover of democracy:

Every month that goes by without even an acknowledgment that this is happening, or that this could potentially happen, is deeply unnerving to me, because if January 6 didn't bring it home, if Trump allowing and wanting over half a million Americans to die of COVID didn't bring it home, I don't know what can bring it home to these people, and I'm left to think well, maybe some of them want it, too. Maybe it's not just the Republicans. Maybe there's the Vichy Democrats in the fold. Because I don't know how you cannot see it. It's just clear as day to me, but anyway.

Chalupa added:

Joe Manchin is gaslighting America. Anybody who would sacrifice our democracy at this critical time by being obstructionist to his own party, to the tens of millions of people that worked so incredibly hard to bring his party into power, anybody who has that in him has something to hide. So investigate the hell out of him. Expose him for who he is. I'm not even confident a guy like that can be bought off because he will always be demanding more. There's greed in this obstructionism. There’s greed. He's doing it for his own self-interest. And the good moments in America's history—the moments when we've moved forward as a nation and finally achieved some human rights and progress—were when people were willing to sacrifice their own self-interest. Joe Manchin refuses to do that now. And don't buy any argument he's trying to justify his excuse. It's all classic gaslighting.

I got this far in the episode yesterday. I had a few periods of lying awake last night thinking of the urgency that this episode has. So this morning I wrote a letter to the appropriate people in government, that being my House rep., both senators, Speaker Pelosi (through Speaker.gov), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (who thankfully doesn’t block messages not from his home state), and President Joe Biden. Here’s what I wrote. Feel free to copy it and send to your six people. Using the email feature in their government websites and simple copy and paste makes the whole thing easy.

I strongly urge the quick passage of the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. With Donald Trump out of office and the next president not elected until 2024 it may seem there is plenty of time to strengthen democracy. I disagree. We have until July, maybe August. This year. Both bills must be passed before the 2020 census data is released and states begin their redistricting process. Failure means GOP controlled states will be heavily gerrymandered. That will mean in 2022 the House will come under GOP control. And democracy in America will die. People of color will be the target of unleashed white supremacy. You may not trust what I say. Please trust the words of Sarah Kendzior and her Gaslit Nation podcast. She studies authoritarian regimes. Which is what the modern GOP has become. See in particular the episode "Joe Manchin Gaslights America." I am very much aware there won't be 60 votes in the Senate. That means the filibuster must be eliminated, at least for voting issues. Two people (Manchin and Sinema) cannot be allowed to mean the difference between democracy and authoritarian rule. Immediately behind those two bills must be a way to prevent a conservative Supreme Court from undoing them. Once passed the GOP will take both bills to court. The recently submitted bill to expand the court to thirteen members is a start. Waiting until the study group put together by President Biden to produce a report in September may be too late. I see these three bills as the most important work of Congress. They are critical and urgent. Without them nothing else will ultimately matter.

Back to Gaslit Nation. The rest of this episode is about Biden’s phone call to Vladimir Putin and the call summary issued by the White House. Two days after this posted on Tuesday evening Biden declared Kremlin aggression a national emergency. Kendzior and Chalupa did a bonus episode about what Biden said. So I’ll combine the rest of this episode with the bonus episode in a later post.