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**APRIL 8, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

What's the Matter With Manchin?

Good thing Joe Manchin's not a diagnostician, as the man can't tell
cause from effect, causation from correlation. Had he been heading the
CDC over the past year, he doubtless would have concluded that, since
COVID-19 and the proliferation of face masks emerged at roughly the same
time, it was the masks that caused the pandemic.

Consider, as a fair sample of his reasoning capacities, his defense of
the filibuster in an op-ed

he penned in today's

**Washington Post**:

Every time the Senate voted to weaken the filibuster in the past decade,
the political dysfunction and gridlock have grown more severe. The
political games playing out in the halls of Congress only fuel the
hateful rhetoric and violence we see across our country right now.

This analysis has it precisely backward. During the Obama presidency,
for instance, the Senate eliminated the filibuster on a president's
executive branch appointments because a gridlocked Senate-the result
of near-unified Republican opposition to any Obama initiative-used the
60-vote threshold to block any number of appointments. The filibuster
was, and is, an effect of polarization, not its cause. If Manchin
actually could discern the difference, he'd note that the steady
rightward gallop of the GOP has eliminated the middle ground on which
bipartisanship could sometimes take root. (Don't take my word for it;
take John Boehner's
.)
And that rightward gallop has been spurred not by the filibuster, but by
the growth of counterfactual right-wing media; the even more
counterfactual right-wing social media; the counterfactual presidency of
Donald Trump; and the growing racial, gender, religious, and cultural
intolerance within the Republican base, fearful of the decline of white
male Christian traditionalist hegemony, and the apocalyptic stoking of
those fears by Republican pols and media.

Ironically, Manchin's opposition to axing the filibuster comes at the
very moment that President Biden has put before Congress proposals-the
COVID stimulus, the infrastructure and progressive tax hike bills-that
poll well across party lines with actual Americans, but that
congressional Republicans, in obeisance to the GOP's rabid base and
equally rabid far-right media, have uniformly opposed, either by vote
(the COVID stimulus) or in word (the bills yet to be voted on). Given a
chance to begin to create at least a patch of the middle ground he
claims he wishes to nurture, Manchin actually will stomp it out of
existence if he continues to uphold the filibuster.

How, then, do we diagnose Manchin's Ailment? Failure of intellect? Not
entirely. Deliberate misreading of history? We're getting warmer.
Putting his own political needs as a Democrat from a deeply Republican
state over those of the nation? Bull's-eye! What Manchin touts as his
centrism is really a severe case of narcissism.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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