If you’re paying attention you know that the key political question of the next year is when and under what circumstances Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia will agree to the mini-nuke option against the filibuster. I still think it will happen by this summer; the rules will be changed for an individual piece of legislation deemed too important to fail. A Democratic Party unable to sufficiently sell its message to pass major reform by the regular rules now insists that history demands it change them: both the people and the rules.
Their approach is smart and, even if you grant the earnestness of their policy beliefs, nefarious nonetheless. The Democratic Party is now at every point attacking our common processes and institutions: the filibuster, the Supreme Court, the number of states, our election rules, and our very sovereignty at the border. Cumulatively, this is a revolution in slow motion.
What we saw in Wednesday’s hearings, and in Thursday morning's lockstep response, was the continued attempt to legitimize the most aggressive of these efforts in House Resolution Number 1. The partisan media line has settled in, it’s voting rights vs. voting restrictions. Not: Unprecedented Attack on Dual Sovereignty. Not: Democrats Say Out Loud Their Plan for a Permanent Majority. Not Even: Democrats Plan to Break Our Elections.
We know this is important to Democrats because this is the first resolution introduced in the House several years in a row. We also know it because of how disciplined the media have been in parroting their message. They’ve set an Overton window that allows criticism in one minor area: they tell us that some election experts fear the changes are unworkable and could put pressure on the conduct of the ’22 midterms. I’ve noted very similar phrasing on that issue in at least three articles in the past few days.
I am reluctant to engage with this line of criticism because to do so legitimizes a bill that must be rejected on principle, not reshaped in committee or scavenged for parts in some future bipartisan compromise. However, what the media are admitting is that the deadlines will for the most part will not be workable, but all of the measures preventing election security will be in place. The prohibitions against challenging ballots or verifying the residency of voters will all stick, but none of the election security measures (e.g. paper ballot records) will be in place. Does this sound familiar? It’s a de facto moratorium on election security, the precedent will be set.
Many of us are old enough to remember when the Democrats did this same thing with the ACA. They front-loaded all the benefits and hid all the costs, and when things go wrong Republicans get blamed for holding back additional funding. Those paper ballots that supposedly provide a secure backup for each vote, unlikely to be ready. The telephone registration systems each state will be required to have, they don’t exist yet. But, the state contacting your sixteen-year-old who will be auto-enrolled unless they specifically decline? I bet they’ll be ready to do that. The left-leaning GOTV materials and encouragement to participate in “public election activities” in your schoolchildren’s curricula? Bet that will be ready too. How about the administrators who will draw your congressional districts for you? They’ll get those in place immediately. All the areas that help the Democrats protect their slim majority will be in place, and all the technical aspects of actually managing an election will be casualties. Imagine the rollout of healthcare.gov except it’s the peaceful transfer of power. Can we afford that risk?
Joe Biden now fancies himself the next FDR. In terms of wielding executive branch power in a historically aggressive manner and in threatening to expand the Supreme Court, he may be right. But where he is very wrong is in thinking that he’s coming in after the type of crisis that FDR inherited and prolonged. Biden’s spending and recklessness are coming before the major crisis and will help precipitate it. You can see it in the “stimmy checks” that have further fueled a frothy, divorced from reality stock market. You can see it in the $28 trillion we owe as of today, a number growing so fast we’re becoming inured to it. Of that impressive list of historians with the president this week, did any of them think to remind him: Pride comes first Joe.