The Democrats Aren't Powerless to Flip Joe Manchin

By Branko Marcetic, Jacobin

16 June 21

Democratic leaders claim to be powerless against the handful of conservative Democrats blocking progressive reform. Yet when it comes to government surveillance or funding war, those Democrats always know how to force rank-and-file lawmakers to fall in line.

he Democratic Party, and the country as a whole, are in a unique dilemma. Democrats, liberals, and even the center seem to have finally woken up to just how dangerously extreme the modern GOP is, with Republicans openly working around the country to suppress the vote and, if that fails, ensure they can overturn the result if it doesn’t go their way.

Democrats could theoretically head this off with the voting rights bills they have vowed to pass. But to do so, they’d have to first abolish or drastically reform the Senate filibuster, and that idea is opposed by two conservative senators: Kyrsten Sinema and, especially, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin.

Reportedly, President Joe Biden, who was sold to the electorate as the experienced insider and consummate dealmaker who could make Washington finally work, has no plan to induce Manchin to switch. In fact, despite pledging to “fight like heck with every tool at my disposal” to get the voting rights bill passed, Biden has instructed civil rights groups not to pressure Manchin in private meetings. This is because, according to the Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein, and in line with the suspicions of frustrated voting rights groups, the White House doesn’t see that legislation as a priority. Rather, a senior official told Brownstein, they see the most viable path to defeating the GOP’s antidemocratic plans as passing Biden’s agenda in order to “win elections in 2022, so we keep control of the House and Senate.”

Yet that plan is also stalled for the same reason: Manchin refuses to back Biden’s infrastructure bill, demanding it have GOP buy-in. So, for weeks now, nothing has happened, as Biden engages in fruitless negotiations with Republicans who will never support his legislation, offering to cut more and more from the bill to get them on board, and jeopardizing what might very well be the last chance to do anything meaningful on climate change for a long time, as well as undermining future economic recovery.

This is in line with what Brownstein’s White House source told him: that the agenda Biden’s team sees as key to letting the party hold on to Congress in 2022 is about “working to mitigate political conflict and compromising with Republicans.” Unfortunately, you’d be hard-pressed to find a Democratic voter or party activist who shares this interpretation of the Democratic agenda they voted for, as even hard-core partisans are admitting.

So, much like Obama’s agenda twelve years ago, Biden’s is stuck thanks to obstinate congresspeople, and the ritual sacrificing of progressive priorities that results is all but certain to produce the same thing as last time: a midterm shellacking that leaves the country ungovernable for two more years and puts the GOP in the driver’s seat. But this scenario is even more alarming in the post-Trump world, with Republicans certain to not just further rig the rules in their favor but, at best, do nothing about the accelerating threat of climate change.

If only there was something, anything, that could be done to stop it — but there isn’t. That seems to be the attitude of Democratic officials, who have simply given up on passing their voting rights legislation.

Not An Option

As Jacobin’s Luke Savage has pointed out, this kind of fatalism is strange given the stakes. Democratic rhetoric, whether it’s from Biden, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, or Stacey Abrams, is lately replete with warnings of democracy under threat and impending authoritarianism. Yet despite controlling the White House and Congress, Democrats seem to feel all their options have been exhausted.

It’s a stark contrast to the GOP, which has responded to its electoral troubles with typical determined ruthlessness. But it’s also a change from years past, where, when something was a big enough priority, a president and a party have typically done everything possible to find the votes.

Think back to 2010 and the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which had been all but left for dead after a period of GOP time-wasting in which the Republicans used the same techniques they’re now employing on Biden. The bill was resuscitated at the last moment by President Obama and House speaker Nancy Pelosi, who were determined to ram it through. What followed was a full-court press from the White House (“He would do anything, he will call anyone, meet with anyone. He will speak anywhere. He will do whatever it takes,” Obama’s communications director later recalled) and Democratic leadership. Both Obama and Pelosi relentlessly lobbied reluctant members, with the speaker simply refusing to accept failure:

We will go through the gate. If the gate is closed, we will go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we will pole-vault in. If that doesn’t work, we will parachute in. But we are going to get health care reform passed.

In her initial quest for votes, Pelosi had done everything from adding provisions to making promises to take up specific members’ issues, to getting a former university president to pressure his local representative. True, to get the bill over the line, Obama had to resort to an executive order to restrict abortion funds, while Pelosi had to give up on the public option. But, all things considered, she was relatively uncompromising, refusing to break the bill into parts as some White House advisors wanted.

As Gary Andres, then a lobbyist and later a top Republican staffer, explained at the time, a range of options was available to the president for the vote-whipping operation: promises to help members fundraise, spending earmarks, recruiting interest groups to step up pressure, and offers of committee assignments (and threats of punishment).

“The White House has its own ‘candy store’ it can bestow on lawmakers’ districts or by making other policy changes through the power of the executive branch,” he wrote then.

After all, the stakes were high: with health care stalled and no other major legislative achievements, Obama openly warned his entire presidency hinged on the effort.

Pelosi didn’t always do this for progressive ends. When, in the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013, reining in the NSA’s mass-surveillance program became a top priority for both the US public and Congress, Obama worked furiously with the agency’s director to peel votes away from the effort. Key was Pelosi, who “aggressively lobbied wayward Democrats to torpedo the amendment,” and whose efforts had “a much bigger effect on swing Democratic votes against the amendment than anything [the director] had to say,” a committee aide told Foreign Policy at the time. The bill went down by a narrow 205-217 vote.

Pelosi had been just one of the players years earlier in 2008, when both Democratic and Republican leaderships worked overtime to get that year’s hated bank bailout over the line. After failing in September after a weekend of negotiations, party leadership launched a flurry of lobbying while adding sweeteners: a few extra provisions around tax incentives and disaster aid, and a promise from then-candidate Obama to black lawmakers that he would back foreclosure relief legislation (a promise he swiftly broke). Needing twelve House members to switch, they managed fifty-eight instead — thirty-three Democrats and twenty-five Republicans.

It’s instructive to look at Lyndon Johnson, the master Senate legislator to whom Biden has been repeatedly likened by pundits. Johnson, who refused to water down civil rights legislation in the face of a wall of Southern obstruction and a mountain of procedural obstacles, was no doubt a singular figure, famously able to harangue and flatter lawmakers into voting his way. But he was also willing to dispense with tradition and procedure and play hardball, when the time called for it, to aggressively push his priorities.

As recounted in Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power, upon ascending to the presidency and finding long odds for civil rights, tied up as they were in the Rules Committee, he took a rarely used measure that, in the New York Times’ words, “offends traditionalists”: launching a discharge petition in the House to wrench control of the bill from the committee and send it to the floor. Johnson didn’t even have to get a majority of the House to sign: once the number of signatures got close, the chairman, wanting to avoid embarrassment, did it himself voluntarily.

Modern Democrats know how to play hardball, too, to whip their own members, as they did to progressives in 2009. Five months into his presidency, Obama sidestepped his promises to leave Iraq and Afghanistan and requested more funding to escalate US involvement in the latter, hitting a wall of dozens of antiwar House Democrats. In many ways, the holdouts had the advantage, with public opinion heavily on their side.

They were soon met with a wave of lobbying from both Democratic leadership and various White House officials to get them to flip. One House member, Lynn Woolsey, charged that the White House went so far as to threaten freshmen they’d leave them hanging come reelection if they didn’t vote the president’s way. “We’re not going to help you. You’ll never hear from us again,” she recounted them saying at the time. It was enough to peel off nineteen votes, and the measure passed.

On Friday, I asked Woolsey, who represented a central California district for twenty years and played a key role in forcing the first vote on ending the war in Iraq, whether she thinks a similar threat could be made to push someone like Manchin now.

“Isn’t that what politics is all about — give and take?” she says. “I mean, what good is Manchin to the Democratic Party if he only votes with Republicans? It’s common sense, I think. Personally, I think he’s being given too much room already.”

Woolsey says she has faith in Biden’s efforts to restore the country post-Trump. She believes he first needs to know he did as much as reasonably possible to get GOP support for his program before moving forward on a partisan basis. She notes that Biden may be applying pressure behind the scenes, but confesses some frustration that more apparently isn’t being done, pointing to Trump’s continued ability to push Republicans while no longer even in politics.

“And what are the Democrats doing to Manchin? Nothing,” she says.

One point of leverage could be the West Virginian governor’s mansion. According to the Intercept’s Ryan Grim, Manchin still longs for the office he held in 2005–2010 and considered running for it in 2020. Could the very possible prospect of losing a small but significant and disgruntled slice of the state’s Democratic vote for his gubernatorial bid be enough to force Manchin’s hand?

It’s true that the problem runs deeper than Manchin, who is being used as a human shield by other Democrats unwilling to take the heat he’s getting. Yet their very reluctance to withstand that kind of pressure suggests that flipping Manchin could prove to be the proverbial levee whose breach brings the party’s Senate members on board.

Perhaps such moves are already in the works and everyone involved is playing their cards close to their chest. But, if not, it will be difficult for voters to swallow the idea that the Democrats were simply unable to flip a far smaller number of members than they’ve managed to in times past when their agenda hinged on it. The stakes have never been higher.

Eight Years Ago, My Life Began

By Edward Snowden, Continuing Ed

16 June 21

This piece first appeared on Edward Snowden's new Substack page called: Continuing Ed—With Ed Snowden.

Snowden will be writing a weekly column on issues that are important to him and posting it here: https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/lifting-the-mask

We encourage RSN readers to check it out.

-Paul/RSN

ight years ago, my life began.

I was a climbing careerist in the American Intelligence Community, a former CIA officer and NSA contractor, until I discovered that my work — and the work of my generation — had, in secret, been turned toward the construction of history’s first truly global system of mass surveillance: a machine dedicated to building perfect and permanent records of our private lives.

I quietly showed documents detailing the full scope of this new architecture of oppression to my colleagues, who were first alarmed, and then filled with a sense of resignation: what can you do?

And so it was eight years ago this week that I left my partner, my family, and my country behind to reveal evidence of this malfeasance to journalists I'd never met but had to trust.

As part of this process, I also revealed my identity.

This was the moment:

Nothing could have prepared me for the moment when [Laura Poitras] pointed her camera at me, sprawled out on my unmade bed in a cramped, messy room that I hadn’t left for the past ten days. I think everybody has had this kind of experience: the more conscious you are of being recorded, the more self-conscious you become. Merely the awareness that there is, or might be, somebody pressing record on their smartphone and pointing it at you can cause awkwardness, even if that somebody is a friend. [...] In a situation that was already high-intensity, I stiffened. The red light of Laura’s camera, like a sniper’s sight, kept reminding me that at any moment the door might be smashed in and I’d be dragged off forever. And whenever I wasn’t having that thought, I kept thinking about how this footage was going to look when it was played back in court. I realized there were so many things I should have done, like putting on nicer clothes and shaving. Room-service plates and trash had accumulated throughout the room. There were noodle containers and half-eaten burgers, piles of dirty laundry and damp towels on the floor. It was a surreal dynamic. Not only had I never met any filmmakers before being filmed by one, I had never met any journalists before serving as their source. The first time I ever spoke aloud to anyone about the US government’s system of mass surveillance, I was speaking to everyone in the world with an Internet connection. In the end, though, regardless of how rumpled I looked and stilted I sounded, Laura’s filming was indispensable, because it showed the world exactly what happened in that hotel room in a way that newsprint never could.

That was how I described how I felt in my memoir Permanent Record. Today, when I re-read that passage, and when I replay that old clip, I have a curious sense of distance: it's me, but also it's not. I still stand by the words, yet I can't help but acknowledge that I'm always standing at a different remove, contemplating the past from a new perspective, determined by all that has changed in the time that's elapsed. Between the clip and the memoir, my girlfriend Lindsay and I were reunited and married. Between the memoir and the present, we became parents to a son. Between that child and the writing of this sentence, I developed a new appreciation for time.

Though my relationship to time fluctuates, the gravamen of my disclosures remains constant. In the past eight years, the depredations of surveillance have merely become more entrenched, with the capabilities that used to be the province of governments now in the hands of private companies, too, which employ them to track and tether us and attenuate our freedoms. This enduring danger, this compounding danger, is one of the reasons I've decided to lift my voice again — adding a new page to my "permanent record"...one to which I hope you subscribe.

2.

Since 2013, it feels as though the world has accelerated, when really only the rate of opinion has — through the sheer speed and volume of bite-sized algorithmically "curated" social media. On Facebook, and especially on Twitter, plots and characters appear and vanish in moments, imparting emotions, but never lessons, because who has time for those? The only thing that most of us manage to take away from social media, besides the occasional chuckle, is an updated roster of villains — the daily roll-call of transgressors and transgressions.

This is the reality of the fully commercialized mainstream internet: our exposure to an indigestible mass of shortest-form opinions that are purposefully selected by algorithms to agitate us on platforms that are designed to record and memorialize our most agitated, reflexive responses. These responses are, in turn, elevated in proportion to their controversy to the attention — and prejudice — of the crowd. In the resulting zero-sum blood sport that public reputation requires, combatants are incentivized to occupy the most conventionally defensible positions, which reduces all politics to ideology and splinters the polis into squabbling tribes. The products of the irreconcilable differences this process produces are nothing more than well-divided "audiences," made available to the influence of advertisers, and all that it cost us was the very foundation of civil society: tolerance.

For this reason, I'd like to do my part in encouraging a return to longer forms of thinking and writing, which provide more room for nuance and more opportunity for establishing consensus or, at the very least, respecting a diversity of perspective and, you know, science.

I want to revive the original spirit of the older, pre-commercial internet, with its bulletin boards, newsgroups, and blogs — if not in form, then in function.

The utopianism of these blogs might seem as quaint today as the sites' graphics (and glamorous MIDI audio), but whatever those outlets lacked in sophisticated design, they more than made up for in curiosity and intelligence and in their fostering of originality and experimentation. They were, when it comes down to it, not curated and templated "platforms" so much as direct expressions of the creative primacy of the individual.

One history of the Internet — and I'd argue a rather significant one — is the history of the individual's disempowerment, as governments and businesses both sought to monitor and profit from what had fundamentally been a user-to-user or peer-to-peer relationship. The result was the centralization and consolidation of the Internet — the true y2k tragedy. This tragedy unfolded in stages, a gradual infringement of rights: users had to first be made transparent to their internet service providers, and then they were made transparent to the internet services they used, and finally they were made transparent to one another. The intimate linking of users' online personas with their offline legal identity was an iniquitous squandering of liberty and technology that has resulted in today's atmosphere of accountability for the citizen and impunity for the state. Gone were the days of self-reinvention, imagination, and flexibility, and a new era emerged — a new eternal era — where our pasts were held against us. Forever.

Everything we do now lasts forever... The Internet's synonymizing of digital presence and physical existence ensures fidelity to memory, identitarian consistency, and ideological conformity. Be honest: if one of your opinions provokes the hordes on social media, you're less likely to ditch your account and start a new one than you are to apologize and grovel, or dig in and harden yourself ideologically. Neither of those "solutions" is one that fosters change, or intellectual and emotional growth.

The forced identicality of online and offline lives, and the permanency of the Internet's record, augur against forgiveness, and advise against all mercy. Technological omniscence, and the ease of accessibility, promulgate a climate of censorship that in the so-called free world instantiates as self-censorship: people are afraid to speak and so they speak the party's words... or people are afraid to speak and so they speak no words at all...

Even the most ardent practitioners of cancel culture — which I've always read as an imperative: Cancel culture! — must admit that cancellation is a form of surveillance borne of the same technological capacities used to oppress the vulnerable by patriachal, racist, and downright unkind governments the world over. The intents and outcomes might be different — cancelled people are not sent to camps — but the modus is the same: a constant monitoring, and a rush to judgment.

3.

If this past year-and-change has taught us anything, it's how interconnected we all are — a bat coughs and the world gets sick. Vaccines aside, our greatest weapon for defeating Covid-19 has been the mask, an accessory I'd formerly appreciated only a symbol: masks make secret, masks hide, masks cover, in protests as in pandemics.

The social value of the mask has been made clear: they're not deceptive so much as protective, of ourselves and of others too. Masking is a mutual responsibility, a symbol of common identity founded in a common hope. This is the very same rhetoric I've always employed about the use of technological masks: about the use of Tor networks, virtual private networks, encryption keys, and allied technologies that protect our identities online. Over the past eight years, the number of people — of organizers, protestors, journalists, and regular people — who've adopted these masks has been heartening, but then so too has been the courage of those who speak unmasked, in situations where their speech demands the authentication of experience. As with so-called public health, so with the health of the body politic: to drop the mask requires confidence in one's fellow citizens, and in the system in general. From the blue checks to the red pills, we all want to be free to speak as ourselves, and to be recorded as ourselves, without fear of persecution, and we all want to be able to decide what that freedom means, to ourselves and to our communities, however defined. My family back home in the States, along with many of my friends in the States and in Europe, are lucky enough to now be going around unmasked, but millions — mostly in the world's poorer countries — have no such privilege. It's here that the analogy with speech freedoms comes into starkest relief: until the air is clear for all, it's clear for none.

4.

For the past eight years, I've spoken out in defense of speech freedoms on various platforms, but none has been a home. I've been edited by editors, moderated by moderators, crammed into newspaper and magazine columns next to the ads for fancy wristwatches; I've had my thoughts contorted by character-limitations and tripped-up by threads, even before they were taken out of context and misinterpreted, accidentally and willfully. Platforms should ensure a writer has full control over, and full ownership of, their intellectual property, so I'm glad to help give this one a fighting chance.

Readers of this column should expect weekly posts dealing with civil liberties and technology, in addition to commentary on the worlds of whistleblowing and leaking, a series on false conspiracies (QAnon) v. true conspiracies (debt), news roundups, and various reviews and how-tos, for good measure. Subscribers will have access to audio versions of many of the pieces, as well as to a series of podcasts, featuring conversations between myself and friends and allies and occasionally, yes — in the spirit of this space — even some folks I disagree with.