Can Joe Manchin Save the Democrats From Themselves?

One Sane Man vs an Insane National Platform

I have often said that when given an inch the Democrats try to take a foot. Nothing could be closer to displaying this for the world to see than the recent descent into madness of the party, as they run lemming-like off a cliff of their own design and by their own volition, imagining a massive post-Trump mandate that simply does not exist. I wonder if obvious push polls being conducted to defend Biden are inadvertently convincing Democratic members of congress that people have a love-fest with their proposals.

I recall fondly many exchanges with "liberals" and "progressives" on the internet who have shown me poll after poll showing the general popularity of many proposals made by the gang of four, Pelosi, Biden, and others within the Democratic lexicon. In vain, I have tried to remind them that no such poll ever mentions the cost, or frames the questions it asks in a non biased manner. It is worth noting also that no such poll ever asks about those proposals in omnibus form. The Republican screed of "how would we pay for it?" is ignored because it is ineffective at breaking through the cognitive dissonance of the "gimme" generation, not because it is not a pertinent question.

Enter Joe Manchin. A "centrist" (for what the term is worth) Democrat from West Virginia. He has run up against his party a half dozen times already this year because unlike many Democrats in congress, his constituency is not left leaning and not reliably Democratic. In his absence, the GOP would surely pick up the seat, unless he hand picked a successor identical to him. He has become the ultimate kingmaker, the actual de facto senate tie-breaker, which must vex Kamala Harris, who is clearly psychopathic and craves power more than she craves anything else.

Manchin has ruled out ending the senate filibuster which would cripple the purpose of the senate and send congress spiraling out of control, turning it into a rubber-stamping partisan edifice like the House tends to be, and fundamentally decapitating the purpose of a bicameral legislature. Indeed, he is saving the Democrats from themselves in so doing; it gives them plausible deniability when radical proposals that wouldn’t pass even without the filibuster stall out and fail. In the absence of the filibuster ending, the GOP can block most legislation unless the far left can insert it into House bills related to budgetary concerns, subsequently using the dubious budget reconciliation provision to force through their agenda. The Democrats are hazarding themselves every time they do this because it allows the Republican Party to grandstand, mentioning that the Democrats have no mandate at all, and have to resort to work-arounds to get even simple legislation through congress.

Increasingly, with the rise of the democratized internet-of-everything, American citizens are forsaking the idea that members of congress exist predominantly to represent their constituents, and adopting the concept that they represent a federalized platform; a position which is directly opposite the civic and historical reality of congress. Joe Manchin is one of only a small number of people in either chamber of congress that seems to be able to comprehend this phenomenon. It is perhaps ironic and amusing that Democrats revile the man for being perhaps the only senate Democrat technically doing his job.