President Joe Biden just threw down the gauntlet at Manchin and Sinema over Roe v. Wade
Earlier today President Joe Biden announced his support for exempting abortion rights, gay rights, and other privacy rights from the filibuster and codifying them into law. This would simply require the support of all fifty current Democratic Senators plus the VP tiebreaker. But rogue Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema famously don’t support exempting anything from the filibuster, so Biden was clearly aiming this at them.
Biden clearly intends to apply as much pressure as he can on Manchin and Sinema to cave on this, but that’s only part of it. Manchin and Sinema have shown that when they face sufficient public pressure on an issue, such as the $2 billion infrastructure bill, they’re willing to cave just enough to get the public off their backs. After all, they both have to worry about facing Democratic primary challenges if they enrage the Democratic base too thoroughly – and they know that if they lose their seats, their thirst for power is over.
Liberal Twitter pundits are now competing with each other to insist the most loudly that there’s nothing we can do to pressure Manchin and Sinema. But that’s not accurate. We got them to cave on infrastructure, which means there’s at least a greater than zero chance of getting them to cave again.
So what are the specific odds Manchin and Sinema will cave on this? There’s no way to know. But odds are only zero if we give up and don’t even try to pressure them. The formula for pressuring them is straightforward. Pressure them on social media, via phone, via email, and via in-person protests. The key with all of these is to do it in a firm but civil manner. Doing it in an inappropriate manner is not only wrong, it’ll likely backfire.
And if the pressure campaign against Manchin and Sinema doesn’t work, at least it’ll properly frame the midterms for the public and motivate them on how to vote: we just need two more Democratic Senators to cancel out these two do-nothing sellouts. We’ve said before that we need to get to 52 Democratic Senators, and now President Biden is essentially saying the same thing.
Of course we’re aiming for 55 Senate seats just to be safe. That involves flipping five competitive seats, and aggressively defending four vulnerable seats. These are the nine races. To get involved, sign up to receive information from all nine of these candidates:
Pennsylvania – Ohio – Florida – North Carolina – Wisconsin – Arizona – Georgia – New Hampshire – Nevada
