Manchin takes a major loss...Ted Cruz outdoes himself
Senator Joe Manchin this evening pulled the plug on his effort to attach permitting reform to the upcoming government spending bill, a blow to his much-coveted Mountain Valley Pipeline project in West Virginia.
I thought about looking for a pipeline metaphor to swap in for the cliche “pulled the plug” but it’s late and I’m tired. If you have a better phrase, reply to this email and I’ll steal it and use it next time because this fight isn’t over, as I expect we’ll see a version of this bill either in the lame duck or sometime next year. One thing to remember: we *do* very much need permitting reform in order to build out the electrical transmission upgrades and wind and solar and everything else we need to hit our emission reduction targets. If Democrats hold Congress, it should be a top priority, but it shouldn’t just be written by the American Petroleum Institute next time.
The politics of this are/were simple: Republicans were just not going to give Democrats a win on anything this close to an election, particularly something that could be spun as being helpful to bringing down gas prices, even though of course whatever law passed wouldn’t have any effect on energy prices for a good while.
And so there just weren’t enough Republicans to get to the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. As one Senate GOP aide told me, there probably weren’t enough Republican votes even to make up for the Democratic defections. ”If Manchin had included any Rs in his discussions over the last month or so, rather than spring his product on everyone, he might have had a better result,” he said.
One quick question, which you can also answer just by hitting reply (I read all the replies, but don’t always manage to reply back to all of them): Are you seeing gas prices go back up? Seems like a lot of people are seeing spikes in their area. There are some explanations – refinery problems in the Midwest apparently, plus a hurricane coming – but I’m suspicious that there could also be some economic meddling with the midterms afoot too.
Ted Cruz Is A Piece Of Work
Ted Cruz is a piece of work, nobody on either side of the aisle disputes that. Yet his remarks today explaining his vote against the new Electoral Count Act, which aims to prevent another January-6th-like attempt to overturn an election, set a new bar even for Cruz.
Cruz styles himself a clever orator and something of a constitutional scholar. He carries a copy of it around in his pocket and can recite much of it by heart, that sort of thing. And so he often tries to confuse his opponents by twisting or mangling constitutional law or precedent or history in ways that a real constitutional scholar would instantly recognize, but a public watching on TV wouldn’t, so they just give him the benefit of the doubt. He seems smart, after all.
The mistake he made today is that he reached for a historical precedent that is not actually that obscure. Cruz, in casting the lone vote in his committee against the bill, pretended to educate the public about the election of 1876.
But the chances are that you already know the story of the 1876 election, because they teach it in middle school, and the contours of what we teach are broadly accurate: The election was contested, and a compromise was reached – the Compromise of 1877, in fact, since it dragged into the next year – that gave Republicans four more years in the White House in exchange for what Democrats really wanted, which was an end to the federal occupation of the South known as Reconstruction, and a capitulation to the terrorist movement looking to reinstall the planter aristocracy into power. Ted Cruz thinks you don’t know that, so here’s how he described it:
Today’s Democrats have made I think a really cynical political decision: that voter fraud, they believe, helps elect more Democrats, and so the more fraud the better. What this bill does is decreases the ability of Congress to address instances of fraud where it occurs and I believe Congress has a responsibility to do that. I would note that in the election of 1876 where there were serious allegations of voter fraud Congress did not throw its hands up in the air and say there’s nothing we can do about it. No, Congress appointed what was called an Election Commission which consisted of five senators, five House members, five Supreme Court justices that examined the facts and evidence of voter fraud and made a determination. And that incident became the predicate for what is now the Electoral Count Act. That was responding responsibly.
Setting aside the bonkers claim that Democrats rely on voter fraud to win – a claim that Republicans have invested endless resources into investigating and come up with no more than a handful of examples of fraud nationwide, with no bias in either partisan direction among those hapless fraudsters – he’s presenting such a fantastical gloss on what happened in 1876 that it’s hard to know where to start. The notion that the commission diligently sifted through ballots and examined evidence of fraud to come to some objective conclusion is laughable.
The election was held, as I mentioned, amid a terror campaign, in which white supremacist forces murdered perhaps hundreds of Republicans, most of them Black, for the purpose of intimidating them into not voting. And then there was the question of who could count the votes. Florida and Louisiana had Republican governors recognized by the U.S., and they submitted electors, but so did the neo-Confederate attorneys general in those states. South Carolina had multiple authorities claiming to be the official government, and the suppression campaign there involved slaughtering and mutilating Republican voters. Black voters in South Carolina, meanwhile, did not take the assault lying down, and armed themselves in self defense. (The first ever gun control group, the Klan, was born precisely to disarm the South Carolina Black population.)
The notion that a 15-person panel of gray beards could sift through these facts and come to a sterile conclusion about the validity of this or that ballot is absurd. It was a fight for power, and the commission ended up with eight Republicans and seven Democrats.
(How Republicans got an extra seat is a fun story: Democrats tried to basically bribe the lone independent on the panel with a Senate seat, and he happily accepted the Senate seat, but then quit the commission, and his replacement was a Republican. In other words, the planter elites tried to rig the commission, but bungled it and handed power to Republicans accidentally.)
So with eight votes on the commission, Republicans voted themselves the winner, and in exchange agreed to end Reconstruction, which, after the economic crisis of 1873, many white northerners were no longer supportive of anyway. The purpose of the Electoral Count Act is not to empower Congress to create commissions to come up with compromise presidents based on backroom deals. The point is to get Congress out of the way and let voters decide.