Hopefully This Won’t Work

Yesterday PJ Media posted an article about President Biden’s plans to get his legislative agenda passed.

The article reports:

Joe Biden is telling Democratic leaders in the House and Senate that he will lean on moderate Democrats in order to force passage of change to the Senate’s filibuster. He will also lobby hard to pass the voting rights bill that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says he wants to vote on this week.

Biden and the Democrats want a “carve-out” for the electoral power grab known as the “For the People Act.” It would allegedly be a one-time exception to the filibuster and allow for a straight up-or-down vote on the bill, which Democrats mischaracterize as a “voting rights” bill.

Both Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have publicly come out against altering the filibuster and both have expressed doubts about the voter bill without substantial changes. But Biden apparently believes his powers of persuasion will work on them and other centrist Democrats.

Manchin will be a tough nut for Biden to crack. The West Virginia senator has been adamant about opposing any “tweaks” to the filibuster.

Make no mistake–this is a serious threat to our Republic. The U.S. Constitution specifically states that election policies are left to the states–they are not under the jurisdiction of the federal government. Unfortunately at this time, we have no guarantee that the Supreme Court will uphold the Constitution.

Rolling Stone recently reported:

Winning over the two Democrats who’ve declared their opposition to filibuster reform, Sens. Manchin and Sinema, won’t be easy. In April, Manchin wrote in an op-ed that he would not support tweaking or abolishing the filibuster, which he described as a “critical tool” to protect the interests of small and rural states like his. Sinema, for her part, likes to point out how often Democrats used the filibuster when they were in the minority during Donald Trump’s presidency. The filibuster, she wrote in June, “compels moderation and helps protect the country from wild swings between opposing policy poles.”

Yet Sinema has broadly endorsed the need for voting-rights reforms, and Manchin says “inaction is not an option.” Congressional aides and anti-corruption activists who support the For the People Act say Schumer’s strategy has been to give Republicans every opportunity to work with Democrats on a compromise bill, and to allow Manchin the space to lead those negotiations, if only to show that Republicans won’t support any version of pro-democracy reform that Democrats come up with. “We continue to see that the Republicans are not willing to negotiate in good faith on these fundamental issues to protect our democracy,” says Tiffany Muller of End Citizens United.

First of all, we are not a democracy–we are a constitutional republic. If you really want to get to the root of our current political problems, you might want to take a look at the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This opened the door for the corruption we currently see–the illegal campaign money, the earmarks, the runaway spending, the power grabs, etc. The election reforms the Democrats want will make it even easier to cheat.