The Guardian: Joe Manchin’s hard no on voting bill leaves Democrats seeking new path

For months, Democrats in the US Senate have danced delicately around Joe Manchin, giving him space and holding out hope that the West Virginia Democrat would eventually come around and give his must-win vote to legislation that would amount to the most sweeping voting rights protections in a generation.

That detente effectively ended on Sunday, when Manchin authored an op-ed making it clear he will not vote for the bill, leaving Democrats to find a new path forward – that is, if there is one at all.

Manchin did not raise substantive concerns about the legislation, the For the People Act, in the Senate but rather said that he would only support it if it was bipartisan. He also reiterated his resistance to eliminating the filibuster, a legislative rule that requires 60 votes to move most legislation forward in the Senate. Getting 10 Republicans to sign on to voting rights legislation is a fool’s errand, many observers say, pointing to how the party has embraced Trump’s baseless lies about the election and is actively trying to make it harder to vote.

“Republican intransigence on voting rights is not an excuse for inaction and Senator Manchin must wake up to this fact,” said Karen Hobart Flynn, the president of Common Cause, a government watchdog group, which backs the bill. …

Pressure on Manchin will only escalate in the coming weeks. Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, has pledged to bring the bill up for a vote later this month, a move that could force Manchin to vote with Republicans to block the bill. And some experts have embraced pushing a more narrowly tailored law as a feasible way to get some voting reforms through the Senate.

“If Senator Manchin thinks there should be more input from Republicans – as there was in last month’s Senate markup, when several Republican amendments were adopted by the committee – you do that by advancing the bill through the legislative process,” Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel for public policy and government affairs at Common Cause.

“Senator Manchin should vote to advance the bill to a full floor debate, and not filibuster the bill with his Republican colleagues.”