Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema Are a Feature, Not a Bug

‘W hat if — and hear me out here,” writes Robert Reich, “we stopped letting two corporate Democrats singlehandedly block every single progressive policy we elected Democrats to pass?”

Okay, Robert. But how, exactly? The Democrats have 50 seats in the Senate. To pass a bill through reconciliation, the Democrats need 50 votes in the Senate. Two of the people who hold those 50 seats do not agree with the rest of the party on “every single progressive policy.” If the other 48 senators do agree — which is far from clear — the Democratic Party will have 48 votes for its agenda, two short of what it needs. Those two, not the Robert Reichs of the world, are the ones with the power to “stop” things.

“Should all of this just hinge on those two?” Representative Cori Bush (D., Mo.) asked yesterday. “Absolutely not.” But should doesn’t enter into it. The question is does “all of this” hinge on Sinema and Manchin? The answer is yes. Yes it does. And why? Because, again, “all of this” requires 50 votes in the Senate, and two of those votes aren’t on-board.

Underneath the complaints that Reich and Bush have leveled sits the erroneous implication that, come election time, American voters are obliged to press a button marked “Republican” or “Democrat,” and that, having done so, they are shipped a drone-like representative of the winning team from a central repository in Washington, D.C. Reich complains that “we elected Democrats.” But this is correct only in the aggregate. In fact, 50 different “we”s elected one hundred senators and 435 Representatives, who between them make up our majority and minority parties. There is nothing in this deal that obliges those emissaries to agree with one another.

Senators Manchin and Sinema are not a pair of uninvited interlopers who are unexpectedly gumming up the gears; they, themselves, are among the gears. This being so, the duo cannot be said to be “blocking” the Democrats’ de facto Senate majority so much as they are sustaining the Democrats’ de facto Senate majority. Why? Because their decision to caucus with the Democrats rather than the Republicans is the only reason that majority exists in the first place. To hear progressives talk, one would assume that in order to take one’s place within the firmament one must first swear a blood oath to Dick Durbin. Shockingly enough, one is obliged to do no such thing.

A common thread runs through both the progressive agenda per se and the anger at those who are perceived to be sinking it: the mistaken belief that the United States is a homogenous political bloc, and that its states are mere regional departments of the federal government. In truth, even in the year 2021, America remains a remarkably diverse place, where people who have profoundly different geographical, economic, religious, and political needs are able to disagree with one another while living under the same national flag. Tied to our states as they are, a good number of our senators tend to understand this. The Republican Senate majority that lasted from 2015 to 2021 existed only because figures as different as Mike Lee, Cory Gardner, Jim Inhofe, and Susan Collins agreed to coexist in one caucus. Likewise, the Democrats have had control of the Senate since January only because figures as different as Sinema, Manchin, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Angus King have consented to stay in the same coalition. There is only one way that Robert Reich can “stop” this coalition from fraying from time to time, and that is to break it up completely. Is he hoping for Republicans to lure their own Jim Jeffords or Arlen Specter across the aisle?

There are many explanations for the rise of the imperial presidency, but one of them is that the monomaniacal thinking on display from the likes of Robert Reich and Cori Bush has become mainstream. Why did Barack Obama feel that the Senate had “stolen” a Supreme Court seat from him? Why did Donald Trump say, “I alone can fix it”? Why is Kyrsten Sinema being cast as a “betrayer”? Because far too many Americans focus on the presidency at the expense of everything else — even in such cases where the legislature is the primary player. It is a matter of considerable civic irony that, at the very same moment as we are being incessantly told that “diversity is our strength,” we have grown too selfish and too impatient to let our legislatures do what we elected them to do.

It is, of course, true that legislatures are slow and messy and, occasionally, irrational. But that is because the United States, too, is slow and messy and, occasionally, irrational. What Robert Reich and Cori Bush are ultimately complaining about is that their party does not have more seats in the federal legislature. And why doesn’t their party have more seats in the federal legislature? Well, because the American public did not give them more seats in the federal legislature. The reason we have a 50–50 Senate and a House of Representatives as closely divided as it has been in two decades is that the country is closely divided, too. That two senators are able to “block” what one of the factions wants to do is merely another reflection of that division.