On Monday, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the soon-to-be retired Democrat-turned-independent from Arizona, responded to remarks from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer urging Republicans to not “misread the will of the people” and “abandon the need for bipartisanship.”
“What’s the one tool that requires the Senate to work in a bipartisan way?” she said on X/Twitter. “Oh look, the filibuster.”
Elsewhere, Senator Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat who also became an independent, made it clear that he felt a small amount of vindication, after he’d spent much of Joe Biden’s first two years in office harping about inflation.
“I’m not going to say I told you so,” he told The Independent on Monday, but, as he boarded the Senate elevator, he added that people should have been paying attention. He was sort of right, given that the 2024 election turned out to largely be a referendum on the high cost of living.
Sinema and Manchin will leave the Senate and Democrats will likely breathe a sigh of relief. Even though Democrats will no longer control the Senate or the White House, they will also no longer have to cater to Manchin and Sinema’s every whim the way they did the first two years of Biden’s presidency.
The results will be mixed: Ruben Gallego, a more reliably Democratic vote who outperformed Kamala Harris, will replace Sinema. And Manchin, who hailed from an overwhelmingly Republican state, will be replaced by Jim Justice, the Democrat-turned-Republican governor (and his canine companion Babydog).
But while Manchin and Sinema may have caused Democrats multiple headaches — particularly when it came to Sinema’s hesitancy to raise taxes, Manchin’s support for fossil fuels and both of their support for fiscal restraint and the filibuster — the election results and Democrats’ impending years in the wilderness have vindicated them.
In fairness to Biden, some inflation during the pandemic and the recovery was inevitable. Supply chains still being spread thin made it harder to meet consumer demand. The war in Ukraine caused gas prices to further spike. Economists dispute just how much Covid stimulus contributed to inflation and if it caused pent-up demand that caused prices at the grocery store to increase.
But the Biden administration seemed to brush off concerns as early as 2021. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen famously said in June of that year that inflation “represents transitory factors.” Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, whom Trump nominated and whom Biden would later nominate, said he believed rising prices would “wane.”
All the while, Democrats hoped to continue to pass Build Back Better, their mammoth spending package, while Manchin griped about inflation before he ultimately killed the spending bill. He would later relent and co-author the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate and healthcare legislation.
But by then, the idea that the Biden administration did not see inflation as a problem became cemented in most Americans’ heads and just a few months later, Republicans would take back the House. Donald Trump largely saw massive swings not just in the battleground states, but in deep-blue cities where the cost of living spiked.
The same could be said for the filibuster. Democrats have come to hate the 60-vote threshold that Republicans have routinely used to obstruct legislation. According to the Brennan Center, about half of the filibusters used in the past century came in the past 12 years.
This has compelled Democrats to support creating carve-outs for voting rights or, as Harris discussed, to codify abortion rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. Sinema famously put the kibosh on the former and Manchin on the latter.
But two weeks ago, Republicans clobbered Democrats and not only flipped Manchin’s seat, but also seats in Ohio and Montana. Pennsylvania’s tight Senate race triggered a recount, but if Republican Dave McCormick wins, that will give Republicans 53 seats.
That’s enough for a majority but not enough to break a filibuster, meaning it will be one of the last tools Democrats have in the shed to stop Trump.
Manchin might not gloat as much as Sinema, but he has continued to stress the need for the filibuster.
“Whoever's in the majority, they're going to justify whatever they want to do, and in my eyes, it's not the right thing to do, because basically what goes around comes around here,” he told The Independent. “It's the only thing I consider the holy grail to trying to keep this the most deliberative body in the world.”
Manchin might be a little sanctimonious in his defense of the filibuster, but he isn’t entirely wrong. Supporters of climate action and pro-choice advocates, among many others, are likely thankful the filibuster will stop Republicans from running roughshod over policies they hold dear.
Manchin and Sinema will exit, but their words will continue to echo through the halls of Congress.
