Note to Joe Manchin: Partisan Democratic Governance Is A Positive Good, Actually

So this past Sunday, Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) wrote an op-ed in a local West Virginia paper explaining his opposition to the “For The People Act,” also known as H.R. 1. That bill, which was largely written during the last Congress when it officially had no chance of passage, has become the primary vehicle for the Democrats’ election reform ambitions. Of course, actually passing H.R. 1 or almost any other item on President Biden’s agenda will also require either finding ten Republicans willing to support cloture (i.e. vote to break a filibuster) or convincing every single one of the fifty Senate Democrats to support changing/abolishing the filibuster rule itself. Manchin has been pretty steadfast that he won’t do that, although in terms that just might be politician-speak for “not yet.” But in any event, he says he would not even vote to pass the For The People Act, let alone support breaking a filibuster to pass it.

As Jonathan Chait has written, Manchin’s explanation for this position is nonsensical and self-contradictory. For my purpose, the important thing is that Manchin has not yet offered any criticism of the actual policy proposals in H.R. 1. There’s plenty of speculation that he (and/or his donors) are upset about the campaign finance provisions. And there’s been plenty of discussion in the policy wonk sphere about whether H.R. 1 is actually well-targeted to our current democratic crisis, as opposed to just a laundry list of election reform things liberals have wanted for decades. But whether or not Manchin has a policy critique of the bill, he has not actually made that critique publicly yet.

Instead he has simply observed that the bill has no Republican support. His principle, he tells us, is that election reform must not be done on a partisan basis. That would not restore confidence in our democracy, it would destroy it. (This is where Chait’s point about Manchin’s incoherence comes in: the op-ed explicitly says that partisan Republican measures in the states will destroy democracy, but comes out against federal legislation to oppose these threats.)

Now, I’ll give him this. It’s probably true that making the very terms of democratic participation a perpetual subject of partisan controversy is pretty much fatal to a democracy! It’s really really obvious that, if election laws are set through ordinary legislation, the party in power will have a tremendous opportunity for abuse, and to insulate itself from popular accountability. That is an argument not so much for bipartisanship (which won’t prevent a determined majority from abusing power in any case, and could itself be abused to preserve the mutual interests of the leadership of both parties), but for constitutionalizing election laws, or at least subjecting them to close constitutional scrutiny. This is why, for example, I would love to see an explicit right-to-vote amendment.

Alas, our Constitution does leave the regulation of elections almost entirely to the legislatures, of the states in the first instance and then largely to Congress. And given that context, I think it’s important to talk about why Manchin has this not only wrong but backwards. It is a positive good for the Democratic Party, having secured narrow majorities in the Congress and won the presidency, to use that power to legislate according to their own inclinations without feeling any obligation to secure Republican support.

To see why, let’s take a moment to review the nature of the current crisis. It is, in a nutshell, that the Republican Party has coalesced rapidly around the view that the Democratic Party should never be allowed to hold or wield power. This is not an entirely new idea for the Republicans. The refusal to so much as hold a confirmation hearing for Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination was plainly motivated by this same principle. But what is new is the thoroughness with which the party as a whole is dedicated to this cause, basically because of Donald Trump’s willingness to break open one of the most fundamental taboos of American politics and openly reject the result of the 2020 election. As I and many others others have long said, the “Big Lie” is not really a lie, because it’s not really a claim of fact. The idea is not actually that Biden shouldn’t be president because of bamboo ballots shipped into Arizona from China — that’s just the acceptable thing for the fascists to say, because “Biden shouldn’t be president because many of his supporters are black” is still a bad look.

But of course that’s what they believe, in slightly simplified form. There’s a purely partisan will-to-power aspect to the Republicans’ descent into fascism, a simple unwillingness to accept defeat at the game of politics. But it’s also intimately about the nature of the two partisan coalitions. White supremacy makes it intolerable for the Republicans, not just the party elite but the voter base, to exist in a state of democratic equality with the people they consider inferior. I tend to use “black people” as a metonym for that concept, because that’s the single most acute part of the whole thing, but it’s quite a bit broader.

In any event the important thing is that the whole crisis is because the Republican Party, from top to bottom, does not believe that the Democratic Party, again from top to bottom, is a legitimate part of the nation, entitled to participate in the project of self-government on equal terms like everybody else. This is obviously, as I’ve said before, anathema to a free republic. It must be given no quarter, extirpated from public life as aggressively as humanly possible. The fact, for example, that this fascist principle has informed the composition of the Supreme Court is the core reason why I support court-packing.

And so now let’s circle back to Manchin. His principle is that the Democrats should not legislate without support from at least some Republicans. In the current context he is making this case about election reform laws, but it’s not like he wants to roll back the filibuster for everything except election laws. Now he would probably also tell you that he does not think that the Republicans ought, when they are in power, legislate without some support from Democrats. But there are a few reasons why that’s kind of laughable. The Republicans have pretty consistently demonstrated that they’re not inclined to extend the same charity that Manchin is extending to them. And in any event, he’s a Democrat! He’s not in a position to force the Republicans to do anything at all when they’re in the majority.

So the result, if the Democratic Party as a whole did adopt Manchin’s belief in bipartisanship, would be that when the Republicans win elections, then the Republicans get to determine which laws get passed, and when Democrats win elections, the Republicans still get to determine which laws get passed. The most the Democrats could ever hope for, regardless of how large an electoral majority they are ever able to secure, would be a veto over Republican proposals. But Republicans have this always, even when they are in the minority.

That sounds an awful lot like what the Republicans who want to lock the Democratic Party out of power forever want, to me. Manchin essentially wants the Democrats to lock themselves out of power forever, because you see it’s simply too “divisive” for them to exercise the power given to them by the voters on their own. Which only reinforces the fascist principle that the Democrats may never hold or exercise power. Manchin is not just refusing to take the tangible steps that would help us get out of our crisis of democracy, in other words. He is implicitly conceding the fundamental issue in that crisis to the enemy.

This is not okay! And this is why I say that partisan governance by the Democrats would be a positive good. By passing bills on a party-line, 51–50 basis, Senate Democrats would send a strong message that it is legitimate, fully legitimate, for the majorities who sent them to Washington to prevail. They would affirm the right of their own supporters to govern themselves, i.e. to participate in their own self-government on equal terms by exercising political power. Because of course that is what Manchin’s principle would deny, that the people who support the Democratic Party are allowed to just actually exercise coercive power over their fellow citizens. For Manchin as for all the actual fascists, Republican voters are meant to be immune from being subjected to the power of the Democratic coalition.

If I am being charitable, that is a childish and naïve view of democracy, one that seeks to wish away the good old Fact of Pluralism and the centrality of conflict to democratic politics. Manchin sees a nation beset by increasingly violent conflict, and he thinks that the problem is the existence of conflict. But conflict as such is inevitable in a free society. Our problem is that one part of the society wishes to exclude the other part from participation in the government of the entire community. And Manchin’s yearning for a politics of compromise would do their work for them. (If on the other hand I were being uncharitable I would speculate that Manchin might share some of the racist underpinnings of the Republican Party’s fascist principles.)

I have no illusion that Manchin himself is going to listen to me, of course. Hell, I have no real illusion that anyone will listen to me. But I would really like it for the Democratic Party and the progressive movement writ large to make this a core part of what we stand for: our own right to participate in politics on equal terms, and therefore to wield the power that we win at the ballot box without any consideration for what the other side thinks. That is not just hardball strategy, it is a positive democratic good for the nation.