Sen. Joe Manchin, I-W.V., has announced he won’t be endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president. Unfortunately, he’s refraining from backing her for a truly unfortunate reason.
While earlier this month Manchin seemed to hint that he’d consider endorsing Harris, he said on Tuesday that he had decided against it because of her call for ending the filibuster to pass federal legislation protecting abortion rights.
The filibuster has effectively become a way for the minority party in the Senate to thwart simple majority rule.
“Shame on her,” he told CNN. “She knows the filibuster is the Holy Grail of democracy. It’s the only thing that keeps us talking and working together. If she gets rid of that, then this would be the House on steroids.”
He continued: “I think that basically can destroy our country, and my country is more important to me than any one person or any one person’s ideology. … I think it’s the most horrible thing.”
Manchin’s announcement was peculiar in that Harris has called for modifying the filibuster in order to pass abortion rights (and voting rights legislation) for years. Why is he focusing on this now? Manchin told CNN that he had hoped that as a Democratic presidential candidate she might reverse course on that position, but when she called for eliminating “the filibuster for Roe” during a recent interview with Wisconsin Public Radio he decided that he could no longer consider endorsing her.
But on a more substantive level, Manchin’s conception of the filibuster as “the Holy Grail” of democracy is, well, perplexing.
The bedrock principles of democracy are popular representation and majority rule. The filibuster, however, has effectively become a way for the minority party in the Senate to thwart simple majority rule. It is an idiosyncratic procedural tool designed to delay or block a vote on a bill. While, theoretically, the filibuster could be used to encourage broader consensus on particularly big and thorny issues, in modern times it has effectively become a burdensome 60-vote supermajority threshold for passing all legislation, and a bottleneck that kills most significant bills and makes major reforms virtually impossible.
What makes the filibuster even worse is that it is used in a legislative body that already shuns the principle of popular representation and disenfranchises millions of Americans because it overrepresents certain communities (people in small states and rural areas), while essentially making the votes of people in more populated states and areas count less. In other words, Manchin’s democratic “Holy Grail” is in fact a way for minority parties in a minoritarian institution to hold the governing party hostage.
Manchin and many other advocates for the filibuster use language that can imply that the filibuster was part of the foundational vision for American democratic life.
It was not. The filibuster is not in the Constitution, and it was not some key part of the Founding Fathers’ vision for America. (Some scholars have even argued that it is unconstitutional.) As the political scientist Sarah Binder has pointed out, the filibuster was an accidental byproduct of an attempt to simplify rules about cutting off debate in the Senate in the early 19th century. One indicator that it wasn’t deliberate is that the first live filibusters didn’t take place until decades after the rule change that allowed them to even emerge as a legislative strategy; it was discovered as a way to block legislation by creative lawmakers. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., piled onto Harris with a post on X saying that eliminating the filibuster to pass abortion rights was a “an absolutely terrible” idea because “eliminating the filibuster to codify Roe v. Wade also enables a future Congress to ban all abortion nationwide.” Sinema is right that the elimination of the filibuster could cut both ways. But most Republicans — including former President Donald Trump — know that seeking a federal elimination of abortion rights could be an extinction-level event for Republicans in federal office. Moreover, if Democrats succeed at enshrining abortion protections in the law, it will become far more politically toxic for Republicans to seek their removal, since it is easier politically to defend widely used rights and services than it is to dismantle them. (Consider, for example, the resilience of Obamacare; as flawed as it is, Democrats have succeeded in mobilizing voters against the GOP based on the argument that Republicans want to eliminate it.) But Manchin shouldn’t have to agree with all my points about the filibuster to see how he’s lost sight of the bigger picture about drawing lines in the sand over American democracy. There are only two candidates with a chance of winning on Election Day. One of them has committed to abiding by the results of the election, the other has not. We can debate the trade-offs of filibuster reform, and filibuster reform can itself be rolled back. But there is no debate to be had about accepting vote counts, and it’s a lot harder for America to come back from a potential second coup attempt in two elections. Manchin’s rhetoric about Harris undermining American democracy looks mighty short-sighted in light of the clear and present danger that Trump poses to it.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer for MS NOW. Sign up for his newsletter. 
