Rolling Stone's Andy Kroll documents the atrocities of Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, and how he made sure the Voting Rights Act will be left unprotected from the GOP assault as soon as they get power back, something already happening in GOP-run states.
“Giddy” is not a word people use to describe Jon Tester. The towering senior U.S. senator from Montana is blunt and pragmatic. In the halls of Congress, he’s one of the last surviving rural Democrats. When he’s not in Washington, D.C., Tester runs a dirt farm in Montana that’s been in his family for three generations.
A dirt-farming rural Democrat knows better than to overhype. So it came as a surprise when, one day this winter, Tester showed up visibly excited at the office of his friend Michael Bennet, one of Colorado’s two Democratic senators, to share a tantalizing piece of information.
“I think we’re gonna get this voting-rights thing done,” he said to Bennet.
“You got to be kidding me,” Bennet said.
Tester said that Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a critical swing vote on sweeping voting-rights reforms, had signaled his support for the bill and, more crucially, the parliamentary-rules change needed to bypass a Republican filibuster of that bill. “I think it’s gonna happen,” Tester said.
For the previous six months, Tester and two of his colleagues, Tim Kaine of Virginia and Angus King of Maine, had lobbied Manchin on voting rights and the fate of the filibuster. On weekends and holidays, on conference calls and huddled in one another’s hideaways in the bowels of the Capitol, Kaine, King, and Tester had urged Manchin to support his party’s proposal for overhauling the country’s voting laws.
They needed him, with Senate Democrats holding onto the barest majority possible — 50 votes, with Vice President Kamala Harris acting as tiebreaker. Not a single Republican had said they would support the voting bill, which left Democrats with only one path to passage: Change the filibuster, the procedural tactic that requires a 60-vote majority to advance most types of legislation. Manchin had remained steadfast in his opposition to this plan, arguing that the filibuster protected small states like his and forced lawmakers to seek bipartisan compromise. Yet during months of conversations with Kaine, King, and Tester, Manchin had increasingly lamented the dysfunction in the Senate. He wanted, as he put it, “some good rule changes to make the place work better.”
By early January, Manchin had given the impression — at least according to his colleagues — that he was ready to amend the filibuster in a way that would open a path to passing voting rights. At the end of one of their calls, Tester recalls saying that with everyone in agreement on a filibuster deal, all they had to do was put the finishing touches on the voting legislation itself and they were ready to proceed. “Yeah,” Manchin replied, according to Tester.
A “yes” vote from Manchin could not have been more critical for free and fair elections. The Republican Party responded to Joe Biden’s victory with a backlash on the right to vote. Last year, GOP-run legislatures passed 34 laws in at least 19 states that limit access to voting, put partisan operatives in charge of running elections, and make it harder to participate in American democracy. At the same time, a belief that the last election was somehow stolen or fraudulent — the so-called Big Lie — has become an article of faith for many Republicans.
In response to this onslaught, Democrats in Congress introduced multiple pieces of legislation and vowed to pass the bills in time for the 2022 midterms. In public, Democratic leaders spoke in existential terms about the need for reform. “Failure is not an option,” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said. In private, lawmakers and activists predicted victory, arguing that the importance of the issue would overcome the challenge of unifying a 50-member caucus.
They were wrong.
Rolling Stone interviewed more than 30 key figures inside and outside of Congress to understand how the most ambitious voting-rights bill in generations and the Democratic Party’s main policy response to the Jan. 6 insurrection ended in failure. The blame for this defeat, sources say, lies with multiple parties: Manchin either strung along his party for months with no intention of actually supporting the reforms or gave indications to his colleagues that he was on board only to reverse his position on multiple occasions. Senate Democrats, meanwhile, miscalculated that if they could flip Manchin, another swing vote, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, would follow his lead. As for the White House, these sources say, President Biden — despite saying as a candidate that “one of the first things I’ll do as president” is restore the Voting Rights Act — never seemed fully committed to passing voting-rights legislation. When Biden, who had vowed to run an “FDR-sized presidency,” did inject himself into the negotiations late in the fight, his contributions did more harm than good.
Manchin spokeswoman Sam Runyon says the senator “never said he was open to eliminating the filibuster.” If his colleagues believed that, she adds, they were mistaken. The White House responds by saying just because “we didn’t get the result we wanted, we can’t say the power of the presidency wasn’t behind it.” Nevertheless, a question lingers: Why did Democrats’ efforts fail?
“It was like riding a roller coaster,” Sen. Tester tells Rolling Stone. “There were many nights when I went to bed and I thought, ‘This thing is done. We just have to hammer out the details.’ But then something would always happen,” he added. “I don’t know what happened. I can guess. But I don’t know.”
Manchin and Sinema will never allow passage of bills like this. Biden fucked up the White House effort, such as it was. I can't remember the last time a President was afraid of pissing off a Senator, but Biden has been since day one in the White House. Maybe because of his decades as a Senator himself, he knows all too well how much trouble Manchin could cause by making good on his threats to jump party.
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