Here’s a dramatic illustration of why Joe Manchin’s present fetish for bipartisan consensus, highly desirable though such consensus is, is so misguided in the age of the cult of Trump that the GOP has become. By simply stating true facts about the 2020 election and Trump’s attempts to overturn it, arch conservative Liz Cheney has become a pariah in her party.

After the former president and his closest allies, in the two months after the election, spent $50,000,000 on ads falsely declaring the “rigged” 2020 Election had been stolen from America’s Greatest Sore Loser (he made the same claim in 2016, when he won), and at least $3,500,000 to organize and stage the January 6 rally at the Ellipse and the march-permitted march to the Capitol to “Stop the Steal,” and speaker after speaker (including newly elected Congressman Madison Fucking Cawthorn) urged the rally attendees to fight like hell or democracy would be stolen from them, there was little but silence from Trump’s party in Congress after the deadly riot of January 6th.

Only one top Republican member of Congress immediately spoke out, without equivocation, against the president’s attempt to overturn a US election by force. Liz Cheney (daughter of evil incarnate, the aptly named Dick Cheney), stated “there has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.” She voted for his impeachment, along with nine other House Republicans. Cheney was almost immediately censured by her state’s Republican Committee (as were virtually all of the others who concluded Trump deserved to be impeached) for disloyalty to the former president and his party. Cheney is poised to become the leader of a post-Trump GOP, if there is such a thing, but for the moment, she’s a Republican villain to most Republicans.

To defend [Liz] Cheney is to invite the wrath of Trump and his base, while for those members who remain Trump loyalists, interaction of any sort with “fake news media” is increasingly to be avoided. But I [writing for the NY Times] was able to listen in on Cheney’s remarks at a virtual fund-raiser for her on Feb. 8, hosted by more than 50 veteran lobbyists who had each contributed to her political action committee.

At the event, Cheney lamented the party’s drift away from reality, the extent to which it had become wedded to conspiracy theories. The party’s core voters, she said, “were misled into believing the election was stolen and were betrayed.”

Alongside a legitimate concern over a Biden administration’s priorities was “the idea that the election somehow wasn’t over, and that somehow Jan. 6 would change things. People really believed it.”

When one lobbyist raised the specter of Trump re-emerging as the G.O.P.’s dominant force, Cheney responded that the party would have to resist this. Citing the Capitol riot, she said, “In my view, we can’t go down the path of embracing the person who did this or excuse what happened.”

She added: “We really can’t become the party of a cult of personality. It’s a really scary phenomenon we haven’t seen in this country before. Our oath and our loyalty is to the Constitution, not to an individual — particularly after what happened on Jan. 6.”

This month, she told Fox News that she would not endorse Trump if he ran again in 2024.

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Too bad she’s not in the Senate (though she holds mostly repellant views [1] and, for all of our sakes, is better off arguing them in the House) — because the plain speaking Joe Manchin might find common ground with the staunch Wyoming opponent of Obamacare, environmental regulation, gun control, gay marriage and apologizing for our use of overwhelming military force to protect American interests around the world.

Who knows, they might even reach a principled compromise on a national $10/hr minimum wage.

[1] Her position on the first Trump impeachment, for example:

“It’s a system and a process like we’ve never seen before, and it’s really disgraceful,” Cheney said during one TV appearance. Voting to impeach Trump under such circumstances “may permanently damage our republic,” she warned on the House floor.

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Even her principled positions are laced with partisan accusations against Democrats, as she wrote in the opening section of an otherwise praiseworthy long memo to her colleagues three days before Trump’s riot at the Capitol:

The following summary begins by addressing the Constitutional issues, then provides excerpts from and a description of the principal judicial decisions in each of the states. As you will see, there is substantial reason for concern about the precedent Congressional objections will set here. By objecting to electoral slates, members are unavoidably asserting that Congress has the authority to overturn elections and overrule state and federal courts.

Such objections set an exceptionally dangerous precedent, threatening to steal states’ explicit constitutional responsibility for choosing the President and bestowing it instead on Congress. This is directly at odds with the Constitution’s clear text and our core beliefs as Republicans.

Democrats have long attempted, unconstitutionally, to federalize every element of our nation—including elections. Republicans should not embrace Democrats’ unconstitutional position on these issues.

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States’ Rights, y’all, as sacred as the Second Amendment itself. Can’t be a good conservative without attacking the fucking unscrupulous, partisan Democrats, not in 2021.

“On Tuesday evening, President Biden urged Congress to get moving on federal police reform. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed the House in March, but Republicans have filibustered it in the Senate—primarily over a provision to change qualified immunity, the doctrine that protects law enforcement officers who brutalize people from civil liability. The bill would also ban deadly chokeholds and no-knock warrants, restrict the flow of military-grade equipment to state and local agencies, and create a national police-misconduct registry, among other measures.” 

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The purpose of the filibuster rule, as we all know, is to promote bipartisanship among obstructionists. And, of course, to SAVE BABIES!

The filibuster is a critical tool to protecting that input [from small, less populous states] and our democratic form of government. That is why I have said it before and will say it again to remove any shred of doubt: There is no circumstance in which I will vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster. The time has come to end these political games, and to usher a new era of bipartisanship where we find common ground on the major policy debates facing our nation.

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Thus writes the highly principled Joe Manchin of West Virginia in an op-ed called I will not vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster. He believes the two parties must work together. Many Americans believe this, of course, probably most of us, although the solid 40% who support Trump no matter what are apparently down for any Big Lie that might help their party maintain power. There are principled members of both parties, Manchin insists. Therefore, it stands to reason that:

There is also bipartisan support for voting reform and many of the initiatives outlined in the For the People Act. Our ultimate goal should be to restore bipartisan faith in our voting process by assuring all Americans that their votes will be counted, secured and protected. Efforts to expand voting hours and access, improve our election security and increase transparency in campaign finance and advertisement rules should and do have broad, bipartisan support and would quickly address the needs facing Americans today. Taking bipartisan action on voting reform would go a long way in restoring the American people’s faith in Congress and our ability to deliver results for them.

Manchin writes this after the GOP majority legislature of the great state of Georgia passed a voter suppression law that would have enabled Trump to overturn the 2020 election, had it been in place last November, a law so transparent in its intent to favor one party that even corporations have denounced it as the Jim Crow artifact it is.

Manchin writes this editorial after 0 Republicans (in either House of Congress) voted for the COVID relief bill that Democrats narrowly passed by reconciliation.

Manchin believes in bipartisan cooperation with a party that speechified, paid to advertise doubt about “election integrity” based on a lie and cast 147 votes in Congress against certifying an election that officials of both parties declared free of widespread fraud.

Manchin can work with a party that is blocking a commission to get the facts on the January 6 riot at the Capitol. That’s what politics is all about.

I hate to revert to type, but the truth matters, even in politics, Joe Manchin, you stupid, posturing motherfucker. Same goes for your colleague Ms. Sinema.

Manchin reminds me of the Dubya Bush that Stephen Colbert skewered at the Correspondents’ Dinner a few years back. “You’re steadfast, sir. You believe the same thing on Wednesday that you did on Monday, no matter what happened on Tuesday!”

There is bipartisan support for keeping assault weapons out of the hands of violent maniacs, has been for decades. The GOP won’t vote for it. There was bipartisan support for Obama’s moderate nominee Merrick Garland for Supreme Court. The GOP Senate leader told the president to go fuck himself, no hearing, no debate. After Trump fomented, organized and incited the riot on January 6, #Stop the Steal, based on the Big Lie, the GOP fell into line to make sure he couldn’t be convicted in his impeachment, using a dubious rationale about having delayed the proceeding until it had no constitutional force.

Manchin ends his op-ed with these high-minded phrases:

We will not solve our nation’s problems in one Congress if we seek only partisan solutions. Instead of fixating on eliminating the filibuster or shortcutting the legislative process through budget reconciliation, it is time we do our jobs.

So, of course, that means not changing the filibuster rules back to requiring the party blocking debate to stand in the well of the Senate talking and talking. It means not changing the rule to put the burden on the minority to maintain a 41 vote quorum, but leaving the burden on the majority party to find 60 votes, ten among Trump dead-ender partisans. It means changing nothing, but the hearts of Manchin’s fellow legislators.

The odds are 50-50 that Manchin simply turns Republican if pressed hard enough by Senate colleagues. If the GOP suddenly got a majority in the Senate with “moderate” “centrist” Joe Manchin joining their caucus officially, they’d immediately end the filibuster, you can take that to the bank. Manchin would probably be OK with that.

The conservative Red State Democrat already shares many of their core beliefs. You don’t need to make a living wage if you’re poor, you can make do with a much smaller raise — it’s all you deserve anyway. If it’s not for endless war we can’t spend trillions fixing roads, bridges, transitioning to a more sustainable economy, training Americans for new jobs, etc. HOW WE GONNA PAY FOR IT? YOU SURE AS HELL CAN’T FORCE THE SUPER-WEALTHY AND CORPORATIONS TO PAY MORE TAXES! The man is a Republican asset, enjoying his moment as principled king maker/kingpin of obstruction. Fuck him and the flea-bitten bipartisan donkey he rode in on.

A modern day Hitler, say Saddam Hussein, defies the world in some terrible way. The response of the united democracies is to pressure him, by harsh economic sanctions (which hurt his victims, kill ailing children and leave him untouched) or war (which kills thousands of his victims, displaces millions, creates a refugee crisis that destabilizes the region for decades into the future). In the war Hussein is eventually captured and, after a short trial with a pre-ordained outcome, hastily strung up in some kind of garage or hangar, in the middle of the night. Democracy declares itself the winner.

What’s wrong with this scenario? It’s like using an atomic bomb to get rid of a single, nasty insect, for one thing.

I didn’t think of this in terms of Major League Baseball pulling $100,000,000 of business out a state where citizens are suffering mightily under the economic devastation caused by COVID-19 (also known as “Kung Flu” or the “Trump virus”) until I heard this very reasonable commentary from Tennessee comedian Trae Crowder:

If Major League Baseball had announced its firm intention to move the all-star game if certain provisions of the Georgia law were not revised, and used removal of a $100M game as a negotiating lever, might a strenuous public debate in Georgia have emerged? Of course, there is no mechanism available to do this kind of thing, though one imagines such a mechanism, with a May 15 deadline, could have been devised to address something of this anti-democratic magnitude.

Stacey Abrams, who the GOP blames for this bleeding of a fortune from the citizens of Georgia, was against the MLB boycott. She applauded the sentiment MLB’s decision expressed, and the giant corporation’s good intentions, but did not support the boycott itself. No matter, we live in a post-truth, alternative fact America.

Mitch McConnell will continue to threaten and lecture corporations about their political speech extending only to massive, unlimited campaign donations. He will block all COVID relief in the senate (as he did, month after month) unless it included blanket corporate immunity from law suits, no matter how egregious the corporate behavior was. He will go to the mat for the rights of corporations to be free of all restraint, to pursue profits as roughly as they see fit, but that doesn’t give the corporations a right to express outrage, no matter how outrageous the provocation they are responding to.

Zero sum. No solution was ever found in a zero sum world, except for one that benefits one side while screwing the other side completely. There’s no idea of any kind of win-win outcome with a party that only believes in victory at any cost.

Trump and the two GOP senators narrowly lost elections in Georgia. There was an immediate riot at the Capitol, the very day the two new Georgia senators won their run-offs. Trump wildly accelerated his efforts to loudly change the story from the GOP loss in Georgia to the widespread fraud he’d been fraudulently screaming about for months. The GOP state legislature in Georgia rushed to change the law to make sure this could never happen again, to remove any kind of political independence in the counting and certification of votes in the GOP-controlled 50-50 state of Georgia. The new law ensures the GOP wins any close election in the future.

The Georgia law, which ensures the GOP will have the final say in every county, district and precinct in Georgia (as Trump demanded, unsuccessfully, after the thrice recounted and certified election) is a new Jim Crow. The GOP defenders of this law to combat fraud by non-GOP voters appear on TV to snarl that it is not any kind of voter suppression effort, that the new law is needed to ensure “election integrity” and protect it from (imagined) voter fraud, that Blacks not whites are the actual racists, but the law is (absent the long Southern tradition of physical violence against targeted voters), without question, a new Jim Crow voting restriction. Jim Crow 2.0, yo.

The GOP, the Party of the Lie, is determined to pass restrictive voting laws to prevent something that never happened from ever happening again. The traumatic specter of a Stolen Election, whether true or false, requires immediate action to prevent another one.

The Brennan Center recently counted the rapidly increasing number of anti-voting “Voter Integrity” laws proposed in virtually every state in the USA. It is no longer 253 proposed laws in 43 states. I will let Amy Goodman, who reported it today, tell it:

A stunning new report from the Brennan Center for Justice finds Republican state lawmakers have now introduced 361 bills to restrict voting rights across 47 states. Restrictive bills are now moving through legislatures in 24 states, and 29 bills have already been passed by at least one chamber of statehouses.

Early on Thursday morning, the Republican-controlled Texas Senate approved a bill to limit early voting hours, ban ballot drop boxes, end drive-thru voting and to allow poll watchers to videotape voters. This is one of just 49 bills to restrict voting being considered in Texas.

This comes just a week after Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp signed a sweeping elections bill that adds new voter ID requirements, severely limits mail ballot drop boxes and rejects ballots cast in the wrong precinct. One provision would even make it a crime to hand out food or water to voters waiting in line at polling places.

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Recent announcements by Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines and Major League Baseball (the first two motivated by activist pressure) have called out the clear unfairness of the Georgia law and its naked purpose of suppressing non-GOP votes. Coke and Delta CEOs changed their tunes from their first statements that the law was basically a good compromise that had some problems with them to state that the laws is, yes, bad, unacceptable.

It may be left up to corporations, those profit-driven psychopaths, to pressure states like Georgia into back off some of the more draconian, restrictive provisions of what promises to be a raft of these new voter suppression schemes. It is another irony of our corporate democracy that corporations themselves may be the final guarantors of the right to vote, if they can be forced, by organized activism, to exert enough pressure on GOP state lawmakers. Georgia governor Brian Kemp, who angrily denied charges of racism after signing his racist law and called out partisan liberals and out-of-control Blacks, people he accused of racism, immediately shot back at the corporations, who want to remain on the State of Georgia’s corporate tit but who still want to unfairly criticize the State for merely obeying Jesus Christ Himself!

The gutted 1965 Voting Rights Acts, after a 5-4 vivisection by the Supreme Court in 2013, now requires the victims of state discrimination to hire top notch elections lawyers and prove their case in court, rather than as the law intended when putting the burden on states proposing such laws, before they could be signed into law, to demonstrate they had no discriminatory intent in making seemingly one-sided laws.

Lawsuits contesting these laws, if passed (and why wouldn’t they be by a majority Republican state legislature?) will eventually reach a 6-3 Supreme Court for final adjudication. John Roberts, the “balls and strikes umpire,” author of the 2013 decision eviscerating the Voting Rights Act (we post-racial now, y’all) who has never met a voter suppression law he couldn’t find legal grounds to wink at, won’t even be a swing vote this time. Like the famously deadly Tinkers-to Evers-to Chance double play combination of baseball lore the decision will go Thomas to Alito to Gorsuch to Kavanaugh to Coney-Barrett for a Federalist Society consistent outcome.

The Party of the Lie believes in straight 51-49 suck it democracy — no rights for the “minority”. If we have the votes, fuck you. If you have the votes, you’re not being bipartisan if you don’t work with us, you’re tyrants, monsters, Nazis.

Look again at these two maps and see what you think about 51-49 democracy where if we have 51 votes you can go suck it, cuck. The 49 percent or so who voted against the GOP in Georgia (which Biden won 49.47% to 49.24%)? Fuck y’all, we got the gerrymandered state legislature and the governorship, eat it.

That said, it’s imperative to get rid of both the filibuster and the Electoral College, two anti-democratic institutions falsely claimed to be protectors of democracy. It would also be a very good idea to expand the Supreme Court to 15 or so, and to place term limits on the Justices to ensure a regular opportunity for each party to appoint successors. If those things aren’t done, the Party of the Lie will prevail, wildly successful extremist Charles Koch will continue to smile his “aw shucks” grin during his endless victory lap, and we will have a one party 51-49 suck it state here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

And, unlike the grounds for voter suppression laws proposed in 47 states, that ain’t no lie.

Easy to vote and hard to cheat, secure, fair and accessible, you say. No significant cheating was found, by officials in both parties, in the secure, fair and historically accessible 2020 Georgia elections, but, what the hey. Georgia will fix it, next time millions of unqualified voters sneak their way to the ballot box to subvert the will of the leader– and they won’t leave it up to a “principled” Secretary of State, either.

Kemp, well-known midnight purger of Georgia voting rolls (when he was Secretary of State running for governor), was so proud that he signed this important voter suppression law in his office, behind closed doors, under a painting of a famous slave plantation. Georgia state representative Park Cannon, who knocked on the governor’s door during the secretive signing ceremony, was handcuffed and hustled out of the building by silent Georgia State Troopers. She was later charged with two felonies, court challenges to follow. Oh, yeah, naturally Rep. Park Cannon is a Black woman.

Before the fat compulsive liar was banned from Twitter, Mr. Trump tweeted things like this, daily:

After forcefully inciting the Stop the Steal riot, and personally leading his army of passionate, credulous totally non-racist peaceful supporters to storm the Capitol on January 6, Trump tweeted this, one of his last:

Here is what Mr. Trump said about Brian Kemp during his long rant to his supporters, while exhorting them to go to the Capitol to find the traitorous Mike Pence and Stop the Steal on January 6th. I’ve left the good natured rambling diatribe that follows, as a reminder of the essential incoherence of the compulsively lying malignant narcissist (got to love his winking defense of innocent, righteously outraged conspiracy victim Boof Kavanaugh):

And I had Brian Kemp who weighs 130 pounds. He said he played offensive line in football. I’m trying to figure that out. I’m still trying to figure that out. He said that the other night. “I was an offensive lineman.” I’m saying, “Really? That must have been a very small team.”

(LAUGHTER)

But I look at that and I look at what’s happened and he turned out to be a disaster. This stuff happens. You know, look, I’m not happy with the Supreme Court. They love to rule against me. I picked three people. I fought like hell for them. One in particular I fought.

They all said, “Sir, cut him loose, he’s killing the senators.” You know, very loyal senators. They’re very loyal people.

“Sir, cut him loose. He is killing us, sir. Cut him loose, sir.” I will never — I must have gotten half of these senators. I said no, I can’t do that. It’s unfair to him, and it’s unfair to the family. He didn’t do anything wrong. They made up stories. They were all made-up stories. He didn’t do anything wrong. Cut him loose, sir. I said no, I won’t do that. We got him through, and you know what, they couldn’t give a damn. They couldn’t give a damn. Let him rule the right way, but it almost seems that they are all going out of their way to hurt all of us and to hurt our country, to hurt our country.

You know I read a story in one of the newspapers recently how I control the three Supreme Court justices. I control them. They are puppets. I read it about Bill Barr that he is my personal attorney, that he will do anything for me, and I said you know it really is genius because what they do is that and it makes it really impossible for them to ever give you a victory because all of the sudden Bill Barr changed, if you hadn’t noticed. I like Bill Barr, but he changed because he didn’t want to be considered my personal attorney.

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Kemp has now redeemed himself in the eyes of his former backer, one would think. Redeemed in the sense of the “Redeemers” who restored white rule to the former confederacy after a political compromise (ending the stalemate in the 1876 election) removed federal troops who were enforcing things like the Ku Klux Klan Act in the states that seceded to defend White Supremacy. If the law Kemp signed the other day had been in effect for the 2020 election, Trump wouldn’t have had to make phone calls to Georgia state officials asking for the election results to be thrown out, the GOP state legislature could have easily, and legally, fixed things for him.

As she so often does, historian Heather Cox Richardson captures the essential nature of this struggle, between a small group of powerful white men meeting in secret and the rest of us, whose voices are limited to the ballot:

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed his state’s new voter suppression law last night in a carefully staged photo op. As journalist Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer pointed out, Kemp sat at a polished table, with six white men around him, under a painting of the Callaway Plantation on which more than 100 Black people had been enslaved. As the men bore witness to the signing, Representative Park Cannon, a Black female lawmaker, was arrested and dragged away from the governor’s office.

It was a scene that conjured up a lot of history.

Voting was on the table in March 1858, too. Then, the U.S. Senate fought over how the new territory of Kansas would be admitted to the Union. The majority of voters in the territory wanted it to be free, but a minority of proslavery Democrats had taken control of the territory’s government and written a constitution that would make human enslavement the fundamental law in the state. The fight over whether this minority, or the majority that wanted the territory free, would control Kansas burned back east, to Congress.

In the Senate, South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond, who rejected “as ridiculously absurd” the idea that “all men are born equal,” rose to speak on the subject. He defended the rule of the proslavery minority in Kansas, and told anti-slavery northerners how the world really worked. Hammond laid out a new vision for the United States of America.

He explained to his Senate colleagues just how wealthy the South’s system of human enslavement had made the region, then explained that the “harmonious… and prosperous” system worked precisely because a few wealthy men ruled over a larger class with “a low order of intellect and but little skill.” Hammond explained that in the South, those workers were Black slaves, but the North had such a class, too: they were “your whole hireling class of manual laborers.”

These distinctions had crucial political importance, he explained, “Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositaries of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with banners,’ and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided… by the quiet process of the ballot-box.”

Hammond believed the South’s system must spread to Kansas and the West regardless of what settlers there wanted because it was the only acceptable way to organize society. Two years later, Hammond would be one of those working to establish the Confederate States of America, “founded,” in the words of their vice president, Alexander Stephens, upon the “great physical, philosophical, and moral truth… that the negro is not equal to the white man.”

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Meantime, several propagators of the Big Lie about a stolen election engineered by dead Socialists and Dominion voting machines, (the mother of an equally Big Lie about the harmless intentions of the unarmed peaceful patriots who attacked Capitol Police with Bear Spray, other chemical irritants, tasers, flagpoles, barricades, their own shields, etc. [1]) are being dragged into civil court for defamation. Their defense, the noted FOX defense (used to get entertainer Tucker Carlson off the hook for some of his more incendiary lies) is that it should be obvious to anyone that these were wildly exaggerated statements intended solely to whip up angry, low-information people and that only a moron could believe were actually true, no matter how specific or otherwise plausible they may have sounded.

Like the constantly trumpeted claims of widespread voter fraud that were not backed by any evidence whatsoever in any one of almost four hundred Trump/RNC lawsuits brought before and after the election. As no less an authority than Lyin’ Ted Cruz insisted, in the days before and after the January 6th Stop the Steal Riot, loud and angrily repeated widespread allegations of voter fraud are good enough to support anti-fraud measures [2].

Now, about that filibuster, Mr. Manchin…

[1]

Trump went on FOX the other night to insist again that his riot, in which one police officer was killed by peaceful protesters and 140 more injured by those same law and order patriots, was a love-fest featuring hugging and kissing between his people and the police. What is it with the homoerotic suggestions of this giant orange homophobe? He and the North Korean dictator “fell in love”. Sure did.

[2]

This very specific sounding, but false, fabricated claim of fraud, an outright lie unsupported by any evidence, made by Trump while urging his supporters to go to the Capitol and Stop the Steal, stands in for the rest:

There were over 205,000 more ballots counted in Pennsylvania. Now think of this, you had 205,000 more ballots than you had voters. That means you had to — where did they come from? Do you know where they came from? Somebody’s imagination, whatever they need it. So in Pennsylvania, you had 205,000 more votes than you had voters, and it’s — the number is actually much greater than that now. That was as of a week ago, and this is a mathematical impossibility unless you want to say it’s a total fraud. So if Pennsylvania was defrauded.

Over 8,000 ballots in Pennsylvania were cast by people whose names and dates of birth match individuals who died in 2020 and prior to the election. Think of that. Dead people, lots of dead people, thousands, and some dead people actually requested an application. That bothers me even more. Not only are they voting, they want an application to vote; one of them was 29 years ago died. It’s incredible.

Incredible, yes, that’s the exact word, sir — too extraordinary and improbable to be believed. In your defense, sir, only a raging imbecile would take you at your word.