Sen. Joe Manchin cracks open door to tweaking filibuster to pass voting rights

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) might consider tweaking Senate rules to allow passage of a Democratic voting rights measure.

Even as he repeated his “absolute preference” not to change the filibuster at all, Manchin did not rule out supporting modifying the filibuster rule that requires 60 votes to pass most legislation if Republicans refuse to negotiate.

“I’m talking, I’m not agreeing to anything of this,” Manchin said on Tuesday. “I want to talk and see all the options.”

The moderate deciding vote in the evenly split Senate called changing the filibuster “a heavy lift,” a description that indicates he is not ruling it out.

“To be open to a rules change that would create a nuclear option, it’s very, very difficult,” Manchin said.

He also criticized Democrats for enacting a so-called “carve out” to the filibuster allowing confirmation of federal judges with a simple majority vote. Republicans countered by extending the exception to Supreme Court justices.

“Anytime there’s a carve out, you eat the whole turkey because it comes back, the West Virginia lawmaker said.

Along with defending his support for the filibuster, however, Manchin went out of his way to place the need to enact voting rights protections as an equally important priority.

That could give fellow Democrats hope they can convince Manchin and fellow holdout Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) to go along with some kind of end-run around the rules that basically give minority Republicans veto power over voting rights even as the GOP runs roughshod over protecting the ballot in states they control.

“We’re trying to convince both of them to give us a fair chance deal with voting rights,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.)

Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has said he will push to change the rules before Martin Luther King Day on Jan. 17, a timing that spotlights the fact that Democrats view voting rights reforms as essential to protecting civil rights.

Senate Democrats held a caucus lunch meeting Tuesday at which the maneuver was set to be discussed along with President Biden’s Build Back Better spending plan. Manchin said there have been no talks on possibly reviving BBB since he effectively torpedoed it before Christmas.

Some Democrats have floated alternatives to scrapping the filibuster including forcing senators to stay on the floor talking to block legislation or possibly prohibiting it from being used to block debate. Another possibility would be to require at least one vote from the opposing party to pass laws.

They also believe there could be a one-time exception such as the one crafted to allow Democrats to raise the debt ceiling and avert a national default with a simple majority vote.

Manchin and Sinema warn that Republicans could retaliate in kind whenever they retake control of the Senate.

Many Democrats believe Republicans will scrap the filibuster whenever it suits their short-term political needs, like they did when they blocked President Obama from filling the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.