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**JULY 22, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

Biden Backs Keeping the Filibuster

Day before yesterday, I heard that a prominent Democrat had had meetings
with both President Biden and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, and came
away with a surprising conclusion: that Manchin was ultimately OK with
ending the filibuster, but that Biden was determined to keep it.

I don't know about Manchin's true leanings, but the world found out
about Biden's last night
,
at a town hall in Ohio. There, the president acknowledged that he'd
like to require senators to actually talk and hold the floor while
filibustering, but added that he still wanted to preserve this deeply
undemocratic process. He didn't take back his previous criticisms,
including that the filibuster is a relic of Jim Crow politics. However,
he said, "There's no reason to protect it other than you're going
to throw the entire Congress into chaos, and nothing will get done."

Nothing will get done? That's precisely what will happen if the
filibuster is

**preserved**, as Mitch McConnell's Republicans have repeatedly made
clear.

The president's musings, alas, kept coming. Asked about the prospects
for ensuring Americans' voting rights, Biden affirmed that that was a
super-critical issue and he certainly wanted the Senate to pass the
pending legislation. However, he added, "I want to make sure we bring
along not just all the Democrats; we bring along Republicans who I know
better."

Better than what? Better than he knows Boolean algebra? Or, probably,
that he knows them better than their critics know them, or than they
know themselves? Or that they have better instincts, more support for
the fundamentals of democracy, than all evidence suggests?

How to explain the president's determination to preserve a senatorial
process that will doom every element of his own agenda save those which
can be enacted through reconciliation?

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I suppose it's possible that Biden believes the particulars of the
reconciliation package-affordable child care and the expansion of
Medicare, to name just two-will prove so popular that Democrats will
sweep the 2022 midterms and have enough votes in the next Congress to
overcome Republicans' opposition to the remaining elements of his
agenda.

Another possibility, just as likely, is that Biden has been satanically
possessed by Mitch McConnell, who actually is an ill-concealed Lucifer.

More likely, Biden is simply still a creature of the Senate, wedded to
old rules that over the past several decades in particular have become a
dagger to democracy's heart.

If there's any consolation to be taken from Biden's remarks, it's
that he can't veto any change to Senate rules. Still, without his
pushing, the prospect that the Senate Democrats will unite to kill the
filibuster are very, very, very (and very) remote.

Nonetheless, it's clear that the entire Democratic base is united in
wishing it gone. Biden's abandonment of the party's base on this
issue of all issues requires that base to be more militant, to threaten
primary challenges to Democratic senators who don't support the
filibuster's demise. That means the institutions that constitute the
base-unions, activist groups, major funders-need to go on record
backing such primary challenges.

The phrase "Say it ain't so, Joe" was made famous by a 1920
newspaper account of what a Chicago newsboy said upon hearing that the
White Sox's star player, Shoeless Joe Jackson, had taken a bribe to
throw the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. Biden hasn't yet
become a boyhood idol, but the newsie's reaction seems an entirely
appropriate response to Biden's self-undoing-and would it were only
self.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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