BETTIN' ON BIDEN

"You are a lost generation."

In the original French: "Vous etes une generation perdue", attributed to Gertrude Stein during the inter-war years, who got it from an auto-mechanic in Lyon, France.  It was then popularized by Ernest Hemingway, who made it the epigraph in 1926 to The Sun Also Rises.

The auto-mechanic was not trying to be profound.  He was just frustrated that a young employee wasn't fixing Stein's car fast enough. 

Not enough focus.  

When Stein returned to Paris, however, she had something deeper in mind. The carnage of World War I had both destroyed a young generation and disillusioned its survivors.  Old values like patriotism or courage seemed pointless because they had been. Ennui took over, an aimlessness born of the notion that nothing really mattered, and decadence often followed.  It's easy to live in a bottle, or a loveless hook-up, when there is no future.  

The problem was that, Stein's young mechanic and passel of young writers having been sidelined by psychological torpor, the fools who created the initial crisis lived on, free to create the next one. 

Which they did.

You do not get Hitler's fascism without the draconian peace imposed under the Versailles Treaty that ended World War I.  The treaty itself was never accepted by Germans, who thought the "war guilt clause" an utterly unfair re-writing of history and for whom the treaty's required reparation payments were among the principal causes of the hyper-inflation in the 1920s that destroyed what little was left of the German economy and helped pave the way to Nazism. 

French conservatives, however, were hell-bent on insuring against the re-emergence of a powerful Germany, and American conservatives were hell-bent on killing the League of Nations, where diplomatic efforts backed by America might have empowered the more progressive views of Keynes and others who knew that austerity for Germany (or anyone else for that matter) could only end badly.

In the wake of the war, each nation's old guard -- Clemenceau in France and Robert LaFollette in the United States -- soldiered on, having learned the wrong lesson in Clemenceau's case (that Germany could or should be returned to a pre-1871 dis-united and dis-empowered state) and having failed to learn the new one in LaFollette's (that the hard and frustrating work of diplomacy was the only path to peace in what would be an increasingly inter-dependent world).

Even the old guard in Britain soldiered on.  When he was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1924-1929, none other than the later-to-be acclaimed Winston Churchill insisted on yoking Britain to the gold standard of tight money that would ultimately help to unleash the Great Depression.

From this unhealthy stew of nostalgia for a past that could not exist and unwillingness to think anew either economically or politically, fascism was born.

America today is not in the same position as Europe in the inter-war years.

But there are disturbing parallels.

The first is that, as a matter of policy, there are no longer two political parties in America.  On policy, the Republican party has pretty much ceased to exist.  Although you hear occasional bursts of old complaints -- spending too high, deficit too large, border crisis -- the energy in the party is focused elsewhere.  In Congress, it is on preserving the filibuster and voting in block against any legislation proposed by the Democrats or the Biden administration. In the states, thirty of which have Republican controlled legislatures, it is on proposing laws (more than 250 at last count) that would restrict voting among Democratic constituencies.  

Toward that end, Georgia yesterday signed into law a measure reducing early voting from three weeks to one, banning mobile polling places, prohibiting third-parties from collecting absentee ballots, eliminating drop boxes outside early voting locations (and entirely in the four day period before election day), requiring driver’s license or equivalent identification (in lieu of matching signatures), reducing the number of Sundays for early voting, criminalizing the distribution of food or drinks by non-poll workers to those waiting on line to vote, cutting the period by which counties must certify their votes from ten to six days, reducing the period for runoff elections to four weeks, and requiring election workers to count the final vote in one sitting, however long.  

All of these measures disproportionately affect large counties, Democratic voters in those counties and large cities, and minority voters.  Some are ridiculous to the point of absurdity.  For example, one of the purported reasons for the changes was to ensure accuracy but at least two of them -- limiting the certification period and forcing counters to work all night -- make errors more, not less, likely.

As to minorities, "Pews to the Polls" has become a standard in black churches, where congregants were taken to the polls to vote after Sunday services; the days to do that have been reduced.   In majority non-white Fulton County, home to Atlanta, half of the 146,000 submitted ballots in 2020 were deposited in drop boxes. Throughout the state, wait times to vote were six minutes on average in precincts where 90% of the voters were white and 51 minutes in precincts where 90% of the voters were non-white.  In those non-white precincts, organizers often distributed free food and water and voting hours were extended to accommodate the long wait times.

The only provision removed from the legislation before it went to the Governor for his signature was a proposed ban on no-excuse absentee voting.  But that was done because absentee voting is used largely by those over the age of 65, and that group has been trending Republican.

Republican legislators claim the new statutes were needed to combat election fraud.  Though there is no evidence of such fraud on any widespread basis (and very little on even any basis), more than two-thirds of self-identified Republicans now think the 2020 Presidential election was stolen.  They think this, moreover, despite the fact that the claim has been rejected by both the courts which reviewed the election and the state officials -- including Republicans themselves -- who certified it.

The reason they do so is . . . 

Donald Trump.

Trump has been proclaiming and pushing the election fraud lie since the day he started running for the Presidency in 2015.  In the run-up to the 2016 election, he said he could lose only if there was fraud. After he won, he (falsely) claimed he lost the popular vote only because more than 3 million "illegals" voted.  That never happened.  In the run-up to the 2020 election, he recycled his claim that he could lose only by virtue of fraud.  And then when he lost, by seven million popular votes and 303-232 in the electoral college, he spent the entire period from Election to Inauguration Day claiming he had won.  On account of that lie, rioters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, delaying certification of the electoral college vote in Biden's favor, ransacking portions of the building (including the Speaker's offices), and resulting in five deaths.

Trump and the GOP legislators in thrall to his big lie are the closest America has come to actual fascism -- authoritarian diktat cloaked in a statutory garb that gives it faux legitimacy.  Though the party could have been rid of him once he lost, the fact that his lie has taken root within its base has frozen elected GOP officials throughout the country.  

Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy excoriated Trump on the evening of January 6 in the wake of the attack on the US Capitol, but neither of them was willing to impeach him. McCarthy has since visited and praised Trump, and McConnell has said he would again vote for him.  Their not-so-subtle about-faces were the product of fear that Trump's voters would beat them in primaries.  That fear, moreover, is rational.  All ten of the Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after January 6, including Wyoming's Liz Cheney, now have Trumpist primary opponents in their next elections.  For the same reason, GOP state legislators are all-in on the vote fraud lie.

The GOP base did not get this way overnight.  

It did not wake up one morning in the last five or so months, or five or so years, and say "Voila.  It's election fraud causing us all our angst."  The lie took root for the same reason the lost generation led to Hitler.  They did not think they had much else to live for.  And the elites, including those in the Democratic Party, were not convincing them otherwise.  

I remember the '90s.  I ran for Congress twice then, once in 1992 as the Democratic Party nominee in New York's 19th Congressional district and two years later in the Democratic primary when the seat became open.  I lost both times and have one particularly searing memory of the '94 campaign. I ran as an unabashed New Deal Democrat. I believed Clinton needed to be the next FDR and the Democrats had to make life better for the falling-behind middle class.  I did not want "the era of big Government" to be over. Taking it all in, one of my opponents said "You're good on your feet but I'm not hearing any new ideas."

He was right.

I thought the old ideas would work just fine.

Fast forward to 2008.  After a near Depression, America elected Obama and his "audacity of hope", a mind-bending act of racial progress pregnant with unlimited apparent potential. Somewhere between Election and Inauguration Day, however, hope became less audacious.  It wasn't Barack Obama's fault. Ditto for Bill Clinton.  They both wanted to do big things. They both tried.  They were both stymied. 

By mid-term losses.

And the filibuster.

And the holy grail of bi-partisanship.

Meanwhile, the middle class, and especially those in ex-urban and rural areas removed from the computer-productivity growth taking hold in big cities and their suburbs, were either running in place or falling behind. Many if not most of them were one job loss or illness away from foreclosure or worse. And when worse arrived, opioids were not far behind.  

Poverty sucks.  So does forever falling behind.  And worrying about either for your kids sucks even more.  It's easy to get depressed.  I know very few who haven't (one is a cousin, and if his personality could be bottled and marketed, I'd patent and distribute it).  You look for answers.  And are tired enough to accept the bad ones.

So one Reagan, two Bushes, a Clinton, an Obama and a really bad Trump later, it's Joe Biden's time.  

Will it be better?  

Will Biden do what the others wouldn't or couldn't?  

Can he revitalize the middle and lance the fascist boil?

I'm betting on him.  

For two reasons.

One is psychological, the other political.

In the inter-war years of the 20th century, one politician stood out as different from all others.  That politician was Franklin Roosevelt.  In the 1920s, he was different for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. He was different because he was paralyzed, the victim of polio in 1921 at the age of 39. 

In the years that followed, he couldn't walk and could barely work.  The glide path to political power that his name and aristocratic upbringing had greased was suddenly closed.  But he willed himself -- catacombed in steel braces -- to stand up and then carry on, and in doing so, the dispossessed realized -- in the words of that famous worker crying years later as his funeral train passed by -- that he knew them even if they didn't know him.

That's Joe Biden's gift today.  

And accounts for his current purchase on the American soul.  

His father for a time was unemployed.  The family had to live with in laws and in crowded apartments. In the pre-financial aid era, he could only go to schools he could afford. His first wife and one year old daughter were killed in a car accident.  His oldest son died from cancer at 46.  Another is a recovering addict.  For thirty-six years, he commuted to work.  In 1988 he almost died from a brain aneurysm. Every time he is knocked down, he tries to get up.  And if you're down, he doesn't walk by, he picks you up.   

Not since Ronald Reagan has an American president so perfectly mirrored the current American psyche. The two Bushes were keepers of Reagan's flame, even as it sputtered and then burned out.  Clinton felt pain in an America where too many still did not.  Obama was a gift, proof that Jefferson's claims were not just empty rhetoric, and Trump was a tragedy, proof that hopelessness and fear can be turned into organized hate.

More than the others in their time, Biden is one of us in this time.  

He gets it because he's been there.

There literally is not one trial visited today upon America's struggling middle -- whether they are located on the middle of the economic ladder or in the middle of the country -- that he has not personally experienced one way or the other.

Unemployment, insecurity, illness, addiction, death and despair.

He’s seen it all.

So far, he has been pitch-perfect.  

His American Rescue Plan (ARP) has put money in pockets and Covid vaccines in arms. State and local governments will receive needed assistance to regain the revenue lost to the pandemic and schools will have the money to retrofit and re-open.  Obamacare will be enhanced and preserved. By all accounts, child poverty will be cut in half.  

70% of Americans support this.  

All of it.

In a world where, as he said yesterday, "politics is the art of the possible," infrastructure is the next agenda item to be then followed by voting rights.  The infrastructure bill -- which will have a "green" hue as the administration attempts to combat climate change -- is priced at $3 trillion and will have to be paid for in part with some high end and corporate tax increases, and voting rights will inevitably fail unless a Senate filibuster can be avoided (unlikely) or repealed (possible).  Without it, however, the GOP's voter suppression campaign will continue and succeed.  

At the border, humanity has been restored even as challenges remain, and abroad, China and Russia loom large.  The latter is an annoyance, a lifeless, commodified economy whose government consists of a corrupt oligarchy that poisons its opponents.  The former is a growing obstacle.  Both require allied efforts in a world where America cannot go it alone.  

China is a particular problem.  

Its version of capitalism is mercantile and whatever market freedom prevails within its borders will always be subservient to party loyalty.  This means that China will respect neither human rights nor intellectual property rights unless it has to.  This also means that, short of war, a unified western approach will be the only way to change Chinese behavior.  Trump's tariffs got China's attention and his trade czar, Robert Lighthizer, was delivering a consistent message.  But Trump's opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty and his go-it-alone approach with Europe made it impossible for him to apply long-term, non-tariff leverage or even close a short-term deal.  Biden will not be able to change this until our erstwhile allies are back on board. 

And that will take time.

If Biden succeeds domestically, he may get that time, avoiding the fate of lost mid-terms that plagued his predecessors.  If he doesn't, China will still be a problem. 

But not our biggest one.

FDR became president in 1932.  With his New Deal -- a pragmatic amalgam that regulated corrupt stock dealers, offered the aged some semblance of security, and created jobs -- America avoided both fascism and communism.  

In 2021, the challenges are different but as daunting.  

A brewing fascism exists within.  It was seeded by Trump and is now being institutionalized by GOP voter suppression. In the hinterlands, its supporters in the GOP base have grown weary of government that does not work for them.  ARP, however, does. So will a big infrastructure bill.  Together, they can represent real progress delivered to real people by the realist of guys.

That’s why I'm . . .

Bettin' on Biden.   

NORMAL

What is normal?

The dictionaries define it to mean usual, typical or routine. "The expected state or condition," says Oxford.   The word itself derives from the Latin word "normalis" which was classically defined as having been made in accordance with "a carpenter's square", the tool for "establishing right angles."  Bob Vila of This Old House fame calls it the "go to tool for framing, roofing and stair work". It has been around for centuries. 

The precision of the tool, however, hasn't migrated into the current meaning of the word. 

In today's "normal", there is play in the joints.  "Usual" or "typical" is not "always".  Or "precise". In fact, sometimes the messiness of abnormal is repeated so often that it becomes "the new normal", which in truth has to be a bit of an oxymoron.  Repetition takes time and typical requires data from more than one tomorrow.  If the new is routine or typical, maybe the old wasn't.

Maybe there isn't any normal.

Maybe we just create it . . .  

Perpetually turning the repetition perceived in our limited space- time horizon into routines that, from another perspective, are not all that usual after all.

Maybe things just appear normal.

Even though they aren't.

For the past four years, Americans pondered the challenge to normal that was their 45th President.  Many believe the 46th owes his position to the widespread perception that he, unlike his predecessor, is not abnormal.  On this view, an exhausted electorate replaced the narcissistic, self-appointed destroyer of norms with someone who respected them.  

At the end of the day, we tired of all the broken glass -- the absence of any real policy on health care, infrastructure, the environment; the dangerous world of lies where the response to disease was disinformation, where science was side-lined, where aides promoted “alternative facts”; the criminal obtruction and mob-like, omerta-induced pardons of admitted or convicted felons; the predicted (and ultimately deadly) transition abomination where delusion refused to acknowledge defeat; the constant drumbeat of one man's jaundiced ego in 59,553 tweets or re-tweets.

So, we replaced that with . . .

Normal.

And got to take a breath.

We should savor the moment.

Because it will not last.

In the month and a half that has been the incipient Biden presidency, traditional anchors have been laid and the ship of state has been at the very least steadied.  We are back in the Paris climate accord, consulting (rather than dissing) allies, re-peopling the various federal departments with secretaries and undersecretaries qualified to advance their missions,  combating Covid with experts and electeds singing from the same page, and distributing disaster relief with no reference to a state's red or blue political countenance.  

A product of almost a half-century in the political trenches, Biden understands that progress is always slow but can be steady. 

He doesn’t need to be on TV every day praising himself or stabbing opponents.  Other than his Inaugural Address, he has appeared just once, on a CNN Town Hall in mid-February.  On a daily basis, his press secretary talks for the administration.  She is calm and credentialed.  No one has been called fake news, banned from the press room, or had their credentials pulled. 

To his credit, Trump had fast tracked vaccine creation.   He was AWOL, however, on production and delivery.  To that end, and almost immediately upon being inaugurated, Biden used his authority under the Defense Production Act to ensure that the nation will have enough Covid vaccines and created a plan to get them effectively distributed and into the arms of waiting Americans.  

It's the difference between doing . . .

And tweeting.

For a President facing a once-in-a-century pandemic, it is also normal.

The administration's $1.9 trillion Covid relief package has moved through Congress and should be on Biden's desk in a couple of days. It will provide payments of $1,400 for those who earn less than $60,000 annually, extend unemployment benefits through September, and provide the funds states and localities need to retain first responders and open schools. It will also increase tax credits for children, so much so that experts predict the rate of childhood poverty may be cut in half. 

The right and the GOP claim the package is too big, that much of it is unrelated to Covid, and that it belies the President's pledge to be bipartisan.  Biden, however, sat down with a group of Republican senators shortly after being sworn in and made clear that their alternative proposal for less than a third the amount was a non-starter.  Following that meeting, the GOP did not come back with any counter-proposals, House Democrats voted for the bill, House Republicans universally opposed it, and Senate Democrats then amended it.   

They removed the minimum wage hike, reduced the amount of unemployment benefits, stopped states from using any of the funds to pay down public employee pension fund deficits and deleted two mega-transportation projects in New York and California.  

Mitch McConnell, however, still demanded that every Republican Senator vote against it.

Which they all did.

After the Senate Democrats voted for it, however, the amended bill was sent back to the House.

It is expected to pass on Tuesday, again on a party line vote.

In the world before Trump, this was the Republican party's standard modus operandi.  In 2009, in the midst of a financial crisis that threatened to turn into a Depression, no House Republicans voted for the Obama administration’s $787 billion recovery plan and only three GOP Senators crossed the aisle (one of whom, Arlen Specter, later switched parties) to support it.  Later in the administration, when Obamacare was being crafted, Iowa's Republican Senator Charles Grassley -- then the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee -- proposed a host of changes in negotiations with the Democrats only to admit that, even if they were all accepted, he still would not vote for the bill.  

Twelve years later, the Democrats and President Biden were not willing to be fooled twice.

In the country as a whole, the Covid relief package has bipartisan support.  Over 70% of the voters support it, including more than 50% of self-identified Republican. A number of Republican governors also favor the bill, aware that it provides funding they cannot replace and without which they will be forced to cut critical services.  Bipartisan support evaporates, however, among actual GOP House members and Senators. 

Why?

Two reasons.

First, the Congressional Republican party is not a governing party.   In fact, it hasn’t been for some time.  The party is about opposition and grievance.  Policy for the most part is entirely absent.  In the Trump years, Congressional Republicans did two things.  They passed the 2017 tax bill that lowered rates for corporations and the rich, and they stacked the federal courts with Federalist Society judges. On a whole host of other issues -- health care, climate change, gun safety, voting rights, income inequality -- nothing happened.  

This was intentional.

In the Senate, McConnell sat on over 400 proposed bills.  He wouldn't allow them to be debated or voted upon.  The GOP couldn't even come up with the infrastructure spending Trump promised in his campaign (and Democrats would have been happy to pass), and their repeated opposition to Obamacare finally died because they never had an alternative. Indeed, if one of the signature Congressional moments in the last administration was John McCain walking into the well of the Senate in the early morning hours to kill repeal of the Affordable Care Act, one of its signature comedies was Trump constantly promising a new health care plan "next week" or "soon" that he never actually delivered.

Second, even though Republicans do not control the House and now no longer (but just barely) control the Senate, the upper chamber’s current rules -- which require 60 votes to end any filibuster and bring a bill to the floor -- institutionalize a minority veto.  To avoid this barrier on Covid relief, Congress used the budget reconciliation procedure. This special rule allows legislation effecting spending, revenues or the federal debt limit to advance without being subject to the filibuster but limits the number of bills proposed annually under the procedure to three and requires that any one of them not trigger reconciliation for the same reason as any of the others.

After the Covid bill, Democrats will have only two more chances this year to pass legislation using reconciliation.  They are now debating which of their promised packages can be saved via that route.  The likeliest is the planned $2 trillion infrastructure bill.  For those that cannot, the Senate filibuster is a gauntlet that will have to be run.

So . . .

What's a governing party to do?

The Democrats have two options.  

The first is to obtain enough Republican support to remove the possibility of filibuster on any particular bill.  

This will take 60 votes, ten more than they now have. In 2022, there will be 20 Republican and 14 Democratic Senate seats on the ballot, and of the 20, those in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Ohio will be open because Senators Burr, Toomey and Portman are retiring.  It is possible that Portman and Burr might provide additional support now for Democratic legislation on infrastructure.   Toomey is less likely to do so because he is a fiscal hawk.  And none of them are likely to do so on any other Democratic proposals.  Even  if they were, of course, Democrats would still need seven or eight additional Republicans to avoid any filibuster, and after Senators Murkowski (Alaska), Collins (Maine) and Sasse (Nebraska), not even remote possibilities exist on that score.

Nor do the prospects appear much brighter after 2022. Assuming the Democrats pick up those three open seats and hold all of their own (prayers for Georgia Sen. Warnock, please), the only other possible switches are in Florida (Rubio) and Wisconsin (Ron Johnson). So even then, a 55-vote majority would leave the Democrats five short of being filibuster-proof, two short if Murkowski, Collins and Sasse are in play on any particular bill.

The second option is to eliminate the filibuster.  

In his recently published book, The Kill Switch, Adam Jentleson argues for precisely this approach. 

Jentleson was former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's deputy chief of staff and is now a writer. As his book explains, the filibuster was created in the 1840s by John C. Calhoun to protect slavery. It was formally refined and made a part of the Senate's rules in the early 20th century and was then embraced by southern Democrats to insure the survival of Jim Crow.  Indeed, before the 1960s, the only proposed legislation it was used to successfully defeat were civil rights bills. And in the ‘60s, in the wake of Brown, the freedom rides and Selma, the historic civil rights bills overcame it only because (i) the Senate Republican caucus at that time had liberals in it and (ii) President Johnson out- maneuvered his southern Democratic opponents.

Since then, as Jentleson explains, the parties have “sorted” themselves.  The GOP has moved to the (far) right and "negative partisanship" -- the notion that it's more important to beat your opponent than pass an affirmative program -- has taken over.  Today, there is no such thing as a liberal Republican. Though red states comprise a minority of the country’s population, they can always elect at least 40 Republican Senators.   

As this reality increasingly interfered with the Senate's ability to get anything done , moves to end the filibuster gathered strength.  In 2013, the Democrats ended it on any lower court judicial nominees. Their reasoning was sound.  Before 2009, there had been 82 filibusters on all of the judicial nominees proposed by the forty-three previous presidents.  In the five years or so thereafter, however, the GOP filibustered 86 of President Obama's nominees.  

In 2017, the Republicans returned the favor and ended filibusters on Supreme Court nominees.  Having refused to debate or vote on the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to fill the seat vacated upon Justice Scalia's death, they did so to avoid the inevitable filibuster that would have been mounted once Trump sought to fill that seat with Justice Gorsuch.  

Today, therefore, and apart from judicial nominations, the filibuster lives on.

The procedure was created and defended to preserve the Senate's ability to engage in "unlimited debate".  As practiced early on, this literally meant that filibustering Senators or their allies had to continually speak on the floor.  In a strange way, it required courage. For all their transparent (if not then, certainly now) racism, John C. Calhoun and Richard Russell had to stand up and defend their views at length to their colleagues. Today, however, all a Senator has to do is announce he or she will filibuster and then go silent.  Far from demanding courage, the current practice rewards cowardice.

In 2013, when West Virginia's Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and Pennsylvania's Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, in the wake of the massacre of Sandy Hook's first graders, proposed the bipartisan and widely supported universal background check on gun purchases, the two of them literally begged the bill's opponents to debate the issue -- to question them and challenge their arguments -- on the floor.   No one bothered.  Instead, in individual interrupted sessions over the course of a week, opponents delivered prepared remarks to a largely empty chamber.  In total, they spoke for two hours and twenty-four minutes.

It was hardly a "debate".

And it certainly wasn't anywhere near "unlimited".  

Can the Democrats kill the filibuster for good?

Right now?

Probably not.

Why not?

Because . . .

There are only 50 Democrats in the Senate today . . .

And Joe Manchin, one of the very legislators stymied by that 2013 filibuster on unlimited background checks, has said he will never vote to repeal it. 

Manchin claims that doing so would turn the Senate into the House.  He argues that repealing the filibuster would end unlimited debate and turn majority rule into minority silence.  His claims, however, are overwrought. For starters, the House these days is far from the lesser body Manchin assumes it to be.  Unlike the Senate under McConnell, it actually votes on bills and gets things done.  The votes are messy and they are close. But there isn't any legislation that won't be debated and voted upon merely because the minority opposes it. 

More importantly, eliminating the filibuster is by no means synonymous with restricting or cutting off debate. As the 2013 background check fiasco demonstrates, the tool is not being used to preserve debate in any meaningful senses; in fact, given that no one has to take to the floor and utter a word, it is actually being used to stymie debate. In truth, when today's Senate avoids filibuster and proceeds by unanimous consent, it has no problem agreeing on the number of total hours each side will have to debate. There is no reason such agreements could not be struck in the future, and barring that, the rules themselves could easily be amended to kill the filibuster while preserving the right to debate within reasonable time limits. No one will be silenced.

It's probably unfair to pick on Sen. Manchin.  

He represents a state that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in the last two presidential elections and sees no need to walk the plank on a procedure the GOP deems critical to its survival, especially if doing so might lead to his defeat and the loss of Democratic control.  He also isn't up for reelection until 2024, and in the meantime, were the Democrats to win additional Senate seats in 2022, a more robust Democratic majority could eliminate the rule without Manchin's vote.  It is even possible that, were such a Democratic majority able to do so, the GOP might wave the white flag of compromise, lowering the threshold for a filibuster to, say, 55 votes, and requiring that filibustering Senators come out of the shadows and . . .

Actually debate.

I'm even willing to bet that this is what the veteran pol now in the White House, a half century of experience his guide, thinks may happen.

It's incremental.

And slow.

And frustrating.

Maybe even . . .

Normal.