In our last episode of Infrastructure Kabuki, President Biden had committed to tying the fate of the piddly little bipartisan infrastructure bill to the much more robust reconciliation infrastructure bill. This gave hope to many progressives that Dems weren’t going to be hosed again and forced to give up legislature they consider essential in order to placate Republicans and blue dogs, who will then end up hosing them again anyway.

Republicans then put on their best fake outrage faces and hollered about being double crossed (because their plan to double cross Dems had been stymied). The beltway press mostly went along with the Republicans and reported their Kabuki drama as real news. Josh Marshall wrote on Sunday:

We started with Biden stating openly what all the parties to the proposed bipartisan legislation know, which is that for Democrats it’s a package deal. Democrats know that. Republicans know that. The reporters know that. And yet the same folks have decided to take the feigned Republican freakout entirely at face value regardless. Politico of all places was closer to the mark on Friday when they noted that it took a day for Republicans to realize they were upset and what about.

And it’s actually accelerated over the weekend.

Yesterday the conventional wisdom among DC reporters was that yes this was all known. But Biden stated it too openly. So it was excessive candor that upset a fragile bipartisan coalition rather than any change of strategy or position. But hear Annie Linskey in the Post last night: “President Biden on Saturday reversed a stand he had taken forcefully just two days earlier …” The weekend clarification statement has now gone from being a fuzzy and ambiguous statement muddying up linkage to an abject surrender after a forceful assertion of a new policy.

See also David Dayen at The American Prospect, Washington Isn’t Used to the Left Setting the Agenda.

Biden, responding to press questions after signing off on a bipartisan infrastructure agreement reached with ten senators, explained that it was just one half of an agenda that also included a separate public-investment bill, the American Families Plan, which included spending on education, welfare benefits, the care economy, and more. Both halves would “move through the legislative process promptly and in tandem,” Biden said. He then added that if the two bills didn’t arrive at his desk, he wouldn’t move forward with just the bipartisan measure. “If this is the only thing that comes to me, I’m not signing it,” he concluded.

Washington, or at least the part of Washington wired for Republicans, went berserk. It was called “extortion,” and a “double cross.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) left the bipartisan gang in a huff, and Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) tried to get moderate Democrats to sabotage the reconciliation bill.

The caterwaul led the White House to walk back the statement, although careful perusal doesn’t show all that much walking back. Biden said in a statement that it was “certainly not my intent” to give the impression that he was threatening to veto the bipartisan bill absent a follow-up. But he added that he would still move forward with a second bill under budget reconciliation. “Our bipartisan agreement does not preclude Republicans from attempting to defeat my Families Plan,” Biden said; “likewise, they should have no objections to my devoted efforts to pass that Families Plan and other proposals in tandem.”

In other words, Biden is saying yes, he will still pursue a second bill, and Republicans can go ahead and try to stop it, even though they don’t have the votes, since reconciliation bills can go forward with a bare majority in the Senate. GOP members of the bipartisan gang appeared satisfied with this take on the Sunday shows, even though it’s not all that different from what Biden said extemporaneously at the press conference.

The usual bullshit. But whatever President Biden might have said, Nancy Pelosi has vowed the bipartisan bill doesn’t get voted on in the House before the reconciliation bill passes in the Senate. And none of this could possibly have been news to anybody inside the Beltway. I was writing here about the two bills being tied together at least ten days ago.

Note that neither bill is a bill yet; they’re both just frameworks at the moment.

Today, Mitch McConnell (in the Kabuki role of Aragoto) is still working the refs to get the two proposed bills decoupled. Mitch has assigned himself the role of arbiter of what’s proper and what’s not among Democrats, and he is demanding that Democrats in Congress drop the reconciliation bill. Kate Riga writes at TPM:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) insisted Monday that Democratic leadership drop its so-far effective strategy to link the bipartisan and reconciliation infrastructure bills, to make it easier for him to extract a win on the former and watch the latter die. …

… “Unless Leader Schumer and Speaker Pelosi walk-back their threats that they will refuse to send the president a bipartisan infrastructure bill unless they also separately pass trillions of dollars for unrelated tax hikes, wasteful spending, and Green New Deal socialism, then President Biden’s walk-back of his veto threat would be a hollow gesture,” McConnell wrote in his Monday statement.

Yeah, how dare Democrats set their own agenda! The nerve! Paul Waldman:

First, the Trump Organization could face indictments next week. This would be charges from the Manhattan D.A. office. Maybe. We’ll see.

Derek Chauvin has been sentence to 22 1/2 years for the murder of George Floyd. He is expected to face 15 years.

Remember the Trump trains from last summer? Remember the episode in which a “train” tried to run a Biden campaign bus off the road in Texas? Well, some former Biden campaign workers are suing.

In their complaint, the plaintiffs recalled that Trump supporters “terrorized and menaced the driver and passengers on the Biden-Harris Campaign’s bus” for at least 90 minutes on Oct. 30. The plaintiffs also claimed that the defendants yelled death threats and were “bragging about their aggressive driving.”

“They played a madcap game of highway ‘chicken,’ coming within three to four inches of the bus,” the lawsuit alleges, referring to the defendants. “They tried to run the bus off the road.”

The lawsuit also alleges that the plaintiffs have suffered “ongoing psychological and emotional injury” as a result of the incident.

The Biden campaign canceled an event last October after claiming that its bus was swarmed by Trump supporters on a Texas highway.

The Trump supporters listed in the lawsuit include: Eliazar Cisneros, Hannah Ceh, Joeylynn Mesaros, Robert Mesaros and other unnamed defendants — many of whom were identified through their social media posts of the incident that showed their license plate numbers.

Even better — the Department of Justice is suing Georgia over voting restrictions. Gov. Kemp is whining about far-left agendas and government overreach. The usual stuff.

Speaking of whining — see Graham: Biden made GOP look like ‘f—ing idiots’ at Politico. Miz Lindsey figured out that the Dems didn’t fall for the GOP trap. See also How Dare You Prevent Us From Screwing You, GOP Cries at TPM.

President Biden announced he has signed off on the bipartisan infrastructure bill. We don’t yet know exactly what’s in it. Greg Sargent writes, “The emerging bipartisan deal, which Biden just endorsed, would spend around $1.2 trillion on roads, bridges and other concrete infrastructure, with around $579 billion or a shade less being new spending. It won’t be paid for with corporate tax hikes (which Republicans despise).” However, he says there are no taxes on gas, either. Other than that, it’s kind of a blur.

The plan is still to go ahead with the reconciliation bill to cover whatever the bipartisan bill leaves out. This is, apparently, to placade Joe Manchin and probably Kyrsten Sinema as well, so that they will be willing to vote for the reconciliation bill. It’s a deal that is part of another deal. But we don’t know if it will work. Sargent again:

It’s also the case that many progressive legislators probably think the bipartisan deal stinks out loud, so its passage is far from certain. It’ll also be fun to see how many Republicans will refuse to vote for the bipartisan bill, including some who claimed they would. Maybe it won’t survive cloture. But if it does, and if the progressives are persuaded that passage of the bipartisan bill makes the reconciliation bill more viable, perhaps the bipartisan bill will pass.

As for voting rights, here is the latest I’ve heard. Ronald Brownstein writes at The Atlantic,

Advocates are betting that a combination of what might be called inside proof and outside pressure will yield their best chance of persuading the last Democratic holdouts to restrict use of the filibuster that Republicans employed on Tuesday to block consideration of the Democrats’ sweeping voting-rights and political-reform legislation.

The inside proof is a sustained effort to demonstrate to those reluctant Democrats, particularly Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, that no federal voting-rights bill can attract the 10 Republicans currently required to break a filibuster. Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, a lead sponsor of the legislation that Republicans filibustered Tuesday, told me that Democrats intend to quickly negotiate a new, slimmed-down bill based on the compromise principles Manchin offered last week—and to task him and Sinema with assessing whether any, much less 10, Republicans will sign on.

Democratic advocates want to bookend these intra-Capitol maneuvers with outside mobilization. An alliance of some 70 progressive groups supporting federal voting-rights legislation earlier this month announced plans for more than 115 upcoming events in 32 states. Some of the organizations have unveiled plans for substantial media buys promoting federal action. “The goal is to have a strong showing for the importance of democracy this summer,” Meagan Hatcher-Mays, the director of democracy policy at the liberal advocacy group Indivisible told reporters in a conference call this week.

Go to the Indivivisible website to see how you can help.

Manchin and Sinema are being tasked with finding the 10 reasonable Republicans to force them to personally confront the reality that there aren’t any, Brownstein says. Seems to me that if they haven’t figured that out already they’re too stupid to be outside an assisted living facility without supervision. It’s more likely they already do know this, and don’t care.

In other news, Rudy Giuliani has had his New York law license revoked. John McAfee, the anti-virus software guy, is dead and appears to have committed suicide. Nancy Pelosi will launch a select House committee to investigate January 6.

The Maricopa County, Arizona, “fraudit” is supposed to be winding down; “results” pending. Do see Inside the ‘shadow reality world’ promoting the lie that the presidential election was stolen at WaPo. An entire, complex ecosphere has formed around the Big Lie, and we can be certain some people are making a lot of money from it even if it doesn’t go anywhere politically.

Update: See also Kate Riga at TPM, Senate Progressives Determined Not To Get Hosed By Moderates On Infrastructure.

Sinema and Manchin

This is big. Not long ago the state of Missouri passed a “Second Amendment Preservation Act” that nullfies any federal law that the state decides violates the 2nd Amendment, which would probably be just about anything. Now St. Louis city and county are suing to block implementation of the law.

The county and city say the law is confusing and would prevent state and local cops from working with federal law enforcement. There are ongoing joint federal-city task forces at work addressing the gun violence problem, and the wording of the bill complicates that work. Can federal officers such as ATF agents operate in Missouri at all? It’s not clear. Someone on the television news last night said that the law would not stop federal agents from enforcing state law, but they couldn’t enforce federal law.

From KSDK, St. Louis:

The law would subject law enforcement agencies with officers who knowingly enforce federal gun laws to a fine of about $50,000 per violating officer. It also states that any federal laws, executive orders or other federal regulations to track or take away firearms from law-abiding citizens will be considered void in Missouri, the Associated Press reported.

From today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Critics have said the law will negatively affect working relationships with the federal government, including on anti-crime task forces. They also say the law will effectively defund the police by subjecting them to the fines.

States cannot nullify federal law. This was a matter settled back in 1832, during the Andy Jackson administration, you might recall. But note:

[Govenor] Parson and [Attorney General] Schmitt argued that Missouri “is not attempting to nullify federal law” but was instead “defending its people from federal government overreach by prohibiting state and local law enforcement agencies from being used by the federal government to infringe on Missourians’ right to keep and bear arms.”

Yeah, that makes no sense at all. I haven’t been able to find the text of the bill online, but one of the sponsors says “The Second Amendment Preservation Act declares all federal laws, rules, orders or other actions which restrict or prohibit the manufacture, ownership and use of firearms, firearm accessories or ammunition exclusively in Missouri will not be enforced by state law enforcement, state municipal officials and other state officials.” How is that not nullification? Especially if federal law enforcement isn’t allowed to enforce federal law, either?

See also the U.S. Constitution, Article VI, second paragraph.

In 2017 the state eliminated any restriction on carrying firearms. You don’t even need a permit. We’ve got “stand your ground” and the works here now. After that law went into effect in January 2018, the rate of gun violence in the state shot up. Since then St. Louis has become a shooting gallery. Every single blasted day there are news stories about gun fights or drive by shootings or what not. Even small children get killed.

One would think that any judge knows enough law to see how blatantly unconstitutional the “protection act” is.  But now the bench has been stocked with incompetent Trump judges. So who knows?

See also Red State, Blue City.

Today is the day Senate Republicans will block debate on the voting rights bill so that it cannot be voted on and become law. I don’t think this has happened yet as I write this, but there is no question it will happen.

Yesterday Kyrsten Sinema published an op ed in the Washington Post argung that preserving the filibuster/60 vote cloture rule is more important than voting rights or the environment or anything else. Well, that’s not her argument, but that’s what her argument boils down to.

We cannot end the 60-vote cloture rule, she says, because even if end it to protect democracy, some future majority in Congress might be able to pass bad legislation that ends democracy over the objections of a minority. But as Greg Sargent’s points out, that’s already happening in the states. “In short, the rules of political competition are already being rewritten by one party all over the country, with an eye toward entrenching partisan advantage and minority rule,” he writes.

I had been thinking that Sinema is like someone whose house is burning down but who doesn’t call the fire department because water hoses might damage the furniture. But maybe she’s more like someone whose house is burning down and she rushes in to save the house keys. If the house burns down, nobody needs the keys. If we can’t stop the takeover of democracy in the states, in years to come nobody is going to care about the damn filibuster.

Sinema wrote in her op ed:

“To those who want to eliminate the legislative filibuster to expand health-care access or retirement benefits: Would it be good for our country if we did, only to later see that legislation replaced by legislation dividing Medicaid into block grants, slashing earned Social Security and Medicare benefits, or defunding women’s reproductive health services?”

See Jonathan Chait, Kyrsten Sinema’s Filibuster Defense Is Factually Untrue. Chait points out that a Republican majority in Congress could bypass the 60-vote cloture and pass most such legislation — Social Security is an exception — through budget reconciliation already. The only thing that has stopped Republicans from making the rest of those changes when they’ve had the majority is that those programs are very popular, and touching them is a serious political risk. Chait continues,

The federal government is filled with functions that the modern version of the Republican Party would never agree to create. The 1970 Clean Air Act, creating the Environmental Protection Agency, passed both chambers by a cumulative vote of 447-1, an unimaginable outcome today. And yet those programs and agencies generally earn broad public support and prove impossible to uproot.

A system in which both parties can advance their popular beliefs when they have control of government therefore benefits Democrats disproportionately. Republicans may have some measures they could pass in the absence of a filibuster but not otherwise, yet over the long run, Democrats have far more. That is why, when they controlled government, Republicans frankly confessed that filibuster was “what’s prevented our country for decades from sliding toward liberalism.”

If Republicans have policies they can pass with majorities in both chambers, then they should pass them. If those policies attract broad public legitimacy, they will stay in place. If they are as repellant as Sinema fears, they will be repealed when Democrats have their turn in power. There’s simply no reason why preventing Republicans from trying out their preferred policies is so vital that it justifies handicapping Democrats in the same fashion.

So while it’s true both parties have used the filibuster to block the other party, in effect the rule has hurt Democrats far more than Republicans and has been used to block needed law much more than to block bad law. Instead of eliminating the rule, sinema wants people to “change their behavior.” What incentive is there for Republicans to do that? The rule works great for them as it is.

But this seems too obvious. Why can’t Sinema see this? Is she stupid or corrupt? Could be both, I suppose.

Here’s the latest on the Missouri Senate Primary From Hell. To briefly recap, right now the three top contenders for Roy Blunt’s Senate seat are former governor Eric Greitens, the gun totin’ personal injury lawyer from St. Louis Mark McCloskey, and state Attorney General Eric Schmitt, all Republicans.

The Kansas City Star reports that Greitens skipped an important meet and greet Republican gathering in Kansas City so that he could hang around with the Cyber Ninjas at the Arizona Audit, but that Schmitt and McCloskey were there. This is the part of the article that really leaped off the page for me — “Attorney General Eric Schmitt’s Friday night hospitality suite featured an accordion player.”  An accordian player? What, are we stuck in an old episode of the Lawrence Welk Show? Seriously?

#SchmittFest is happening… pic.twitter.com/m3XwMEHjci

— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) June 12, 2021

SchmittFest is happening! Let your freak flag fly!

“As Greitens spurns a Republican establishment that has largely turned against him,” says the Star, “the other candidates are competing to become the dominant choice of party activists, some of whom fear the former governor, beset by scandal, could put GOP control of the seat in danger.”

Why Greitens would scare the chickens more than McCloskey or Schmitt is not clear to me. As far as issues are concerned, or as much as these specimens care about issues, I don’t see much daylight between them. Back to the KC Star:

In a state where Trump remains extremely popular among Republicans, the Senate candidates are looking for any possible way to tie themselves to the former president. They are playing up Trump-era accomplishments, demonizing Democrats and talking the language of cultural grievance deployed by the former president.

The “issues” pages on the Schmitt and McCloskey campaign websites are remarkably similar and could have been dictated by Tucker Carlson. China is bad! Check. Big Tech is mean! Check. Cancel Culture! Check. Religious freedom (by which they mean the opposite)! Check. Save our elections (by which they mean the opposite)! Check. Save jobs (by which they mean screw the environment and support the fossil fuel industry)! Check. McCloskey tosses in supporting Trump, Critical Race Theory, abortion, and the 2nd Amendment as well.

Greitens’s campaign site doesn’t have an issues page, which I do not find comforting.

According to news stories, both McCloskey and Grietens are still saying that Trump won the 2020 election. It’s not clear to me whether Schmitt is still on board with reinstating Trump, but as I wrote on the earler “from hell” post, Schmitt enthusiastically supported Texas AG Paxton’s stupid lawsuit challenging the presidential election results in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Calls from Schmitt’s office encouraged other Republican state AGs to file amicus briefs in support of the suit, which SCOTUS flushed down the toilet in December.

McCloskey showed up in Kansas City with “Never Back Down” bumper stickers. He did back down recently, however. He and Patricia pleaded guilty to misdemeanors in the infamous protest incident from last summer. They’re paying $3,750 in fines and had their guns taken away. They have new guns now. Stupid plea deal. They should be doing time now for the felonies in the original indictment.

Did I mention that another of McCloskey’s issues is Law and Order? Check.

Oh, and McCloskey is hosting a barbeque and “RINO roast” in St. Louis June 27.

What the “entertainment” is, I do not know. Michael Flynn was supposed to be there  — maybe Flynn plays the harmonica — but he has canceled. Perhaps the McCloskeys can replace him with Eric Schmitt’s accordion player.

Back to Eric Greitens’s pilgrimage to Arizona. The Kansas City Star —

Greitens posted multiple videos of his trip to social media and gave numerous interviews to right-leaning media, falsely asserting that the review could lead to decertification of the election.

“I think we’re gonna find out what all of those results are and it’s very clear. If they don’t have the ballots, they don’t have the victory, and then you’re gonna see leaders in Arizona step up to decertify the election. It’s really simple,” Greitens told The Gateway Pundit.

There are other declared Republican Senate candidates; the only one of note is state representative Vicky Hartzler. Hartzler has a long history of campaiging against same-sex marriage and Planned Parenthood. There are Democratic candidates also, but no one I’ve ever heard of, and I’ll have to do some more research on them.

Blessedly, no one is running television ads. Yet.

He was a good boy.

Juneteenth is now a federal holiday, which is a lovely thing. Juneteenth is a commemoration of the day on which the last enslaved people in the United States were informed they were free, on June 19, 1865.

However, it’s not clear to me that those were truly the last enslaved people. Slavery hadn’t yet been officially abolished everywhere in the United States. But before going forward to wallow in historical nerdiness, let us note that yesterday’s White House signing ceremony also was lovely.

President Biden got down on one knee to greet Opal Lee, an activist who has been advocating for Juneteenth to be established as a national holiday, ahead of the bill signing at the White House. pic.twitter.com/Hsyjh7eAR2

— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) June 17, 2021

People can always complain that there are critical race issues to be addressed in the U.S., and a federal holiday isn’t going to fix them. And that’s true. No argument from me. There has also been some fuzziness in the way the history of Juneteenth has been reported, and that’s what I want to address here.

First, what the teevee people keep saying is that the Emancipation Proclamation, which went into effect on January 1, 1863, “freed the slaves.” But the Emancipation Proclamation only freed people in Confederate states, or the “states in rebellion.” Which meant that on the day it went into effect it didn’t actually free anybody.  The Proclamation did not apply to slave states that had remained in the Union — Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Further, oddly, it wasn’t applied to Union-occupied areas within Confederate states. This left about 700,000 people still legally enslaved.

Further, West Virginia was admitted to the Union on June 20, 1863, as a slave state. Persons in Virginia who had been technically freed by the Emancipation Proclamation were, technically, enslaved again when West Virginia became its own state. The West Virginia legislature quickly went to work passing a law to end slavery in the state, but it didn’t go into effect until February 1865.

Note also that when the Civil War began in April 1861, slavery was still legal in the District of Columbia. Lincoln signed the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act on April 16, 1862. This was the first act of the federal government to abolish slavery anywhere. In June 1862 Congress made slavery illegal in the western federal territories that had not yet become states.

But why weren’t people freed in the four “border” states? As the war began, Lincoln was in a delicate position; the slave owners in those states might have pushed for secession if they believed a Union victory was going to end slavery. The war certainly was about slavery in that southern states seceded to preserve slavery, but in the early months of the war Lincoln had to be careful to make the war about preserving the Union, not ending slavery, as far as the North was concerned. When in August 1861 Maj. Gen. John C. Frémont, commanding the Department of the West, issued an emancipation proclamation that would have freed people enslaved in Missouri, Lincoln promptly relieved Frémont of command and countermanded the proclamation.

Even if Lincoln wanted to end slavery in the four “border” states, and he probably did, he did not believe he had the Constitutional authority to do so. The question of the legality of slavery was up to individual states. Since the Confederate states had seceded it could be argued that areas in rebellion were no longer states of the Union but had reverted to the status of federal territories. But the legality of slavery in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri was up to Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri.

But in September 1862, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation reframed the Union effort as a blow against slavery.  As such it was a war measure and a critical piece of foreign policy. The Proclamation’s primary purpose, historians say, was to sway public sympathy in Europe, especially in Great Britain and France, to keep European powers from entering the conflict on the side of the Confederacy. Southern states were a major supplier of raw cotton to Europe, especially to Britain and France, and the Union blockade of the South was keeping all that cotton in southern warehouses. The Confederacy had also commissioned war ships to be built in Liverpool and was buying Enfield rifles and other munitions from British manufacturers, whose ships apparently were very good at running the blockade.

So, British industrialists pressured Queen Victoria’s government to take the side of the Confederacy. But the Emancipation Proclamation made the question of slavery the defining issue of the war for those looking on, and the British public was firmly opposed to slavery by then. Great Britain would remain neutral. France had more or less been hanging back waiting to see what Britain would do, and it remained neutral also.

There was also the matter of the many Black men — some born free, some escaped from slavery — who were highly motivated to join the Union military. In spite of the brave service of Black men who fought in the Revolution, somehow the U.S. military had decided it wanted only White men as soldiers and sailors. But by 1862 the war was dragging on and casualties were mounting. In April 1862 Congress passed two acts to allow Black men to serve in the U.S. military, although those acts didn’t go into effect until January 1863, on the same day as the Emancipation Proclamation. By the end of the war 186,097 Black men had enlisted in the Union Army and approximately 20,000 Black sailors had joined the Union Navy. Many gave their lives.

The ending of the war, and the Confederacy, in April 1865 finally brought actual freedom to the people freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. In most of the South the freed people knew about the Emancipation Proclamation, and they knew they were no longer slaves. But not everywhere.

On June 19, 1865, Union troops — including regiments of the United States Colored Troops — arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas. And on that day, a somewhat disputed story tells us, Union General Gordon Granger proclaimed that slavery had been abolished in Texas. The date was ever after commemorated in Texas as “Juneteenth.”

However, what’s not clear to me is what was going on in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. By June 1865 slavery had been ended in West Virginia, but technically it was still legal in the four border states.

Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery everywhere in the U.S., in January 1865. It was quickly approved by most of the northern states, and it went into effect in December 1865, eight months after the war had ended and five months after Juneteenth. Only then was slavery illegal everywhere in the United States.

And, of course, that wasn’t really an end of anything, but just sent the struggle for liberation off on a new trajectory. See also Daina Ramey Berry, The Truth About Black Freedom, at The Atlantic.

Statue of Dred and Harriet Scott by the St. Louis Courthouse where the Scotts sued for their freedom in 1846.

You really ought to go to The Intercept and read Leaked Audio of Sen. Joe Manchin Call with Billionaire Donors Provides Rare Glimpse of Dealmaking on Filibuster and January 6 Commission by Lee Fang and Ryan Grim. It does indeed.

It can’t be a surprise that Manchin is talking to a lot of center- and not-so-center Right types with a lot of money. The billionaires — capital management, equity firms, hedge funds — are all associated with No Labels, a “third way” sort of group that lists Joe Lieberman as one of its national leaders. You get the picture.

The Zoom call happened on Monday, the article says, and we see Manchin still nearly frantic to get some Senate Republicans on board with a January 6 Commission, even though that vote was taken in May.

Manchin told the assembled donors that he needed help flipping a handful of Republicans from no to yes on the January 6 commission in order to strip the “far left” of their best argument against the filibuster. The filibuster is a critical priority for the donors on the call, as it bottles up progressive legislation that would hit their bottom lines.

Torches, pitchforks, buckets of hot tar. Grrrr.

Manchin told the donors he hoped to make another run at it to prove that comity is not lost. He noted that Sen. Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican who missed the vote, would have voted for it had he been there, meaning only three more votes are needed. “What I’m asking for, I need to go back, I need to find three more Republican, good Republican senators that will vote for the commission. So at least we can tamp down where people say, ‘Well, Republicans won’t even do the simple lift, common sense of basically voting to do a commission that was truly bipartisan.’ It just really emboldens the far left saying, ‘I told you, how’s that bipartisan working for you now, Joe?’”

Poor baby. But here is the part of the article that is getting the most buzz:

THE GROUP IS passionately supportive of the filibuster, and when multiple donors quizzed Manchin on his stance on it, the senator displayed an openness to reform that is at odds with his latest public statements.

Last spring, he said that he could be supportive of a “talking filibuster” that required the minority to hold the floor, rather than putting the onus on the majority. After an uproar from Republicans, he penned a Washington Post op-ed saying that he would not “weaken or eliminate” the filibuster, which optimists noted left room for reforms that strengthened it in spirit, by forcing more bipartisanship.

In June, he told CNN, when asked if he was committed to maintaining the 60-vote threshold, that he wanted to “make the Senate work,” a sentiment he repeated each time he was pressed. Once again, he followed it up with an op-ed, this time in the local Charleston Gazette-Mail, saying that he had no intention of weakening the filibuster.

Manchin’s openness for filibuster reform on the call is notable given it flew in the face of many attendees’ hopes. Asked about a proposal to lower the threshold to beat back a filibuster to 55 votes, he said that it was something he was considering, but then quickly referred back to his earlier idea of forcing the minority to show up on the Senate floor in large enough numbers to maintain a filibuster.

Hope springs eternal, and yesterday after this came out there was much chirping that maybe filibuster reform isn’t completely dead after all. It also clarifies that Manchin isn’t clinging to the filibuster because he really believes in it, but because his donors really believe in it.

Also yesterday, Manchin released his version of what he wants in an election reform bill. Tierney Sneed writes in Talking Points Memo:

Manchin is seeking to strip several major ballot access provisions from the For the People Act, the bill currently before the Senate, which is also known as S.1. He also wants to scale back the reach of the Voting Right Act’s preclearance regime, weakening what’s in previous versions of the VRA restoration legislation, known as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Preclearance is the requirement that certain states with a history of racially discriminatory voting practices get federal approval for election policy changes. It was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013, and Republicans refused to revive it when they controlled Congress.

According to a proposal document made public Wednesday, Manchin also opposes S.1’s requirement that states offer no-excuse absentee voting. He also wants changes to its voter ID language. Currently, S.1 would require that states allow non-ID holders an affidavit option to confirm their identity; Manchin’s proposal vaguely alludes to letting voters show utility bills or other forms of identification that some photo ID states do not now allow.

But here’s the kicker — this morning Stacey Abrams threw her support behind Manchin’s proposals. No, really, she did. And that’s because of the items in the For the People Act and John Lewis Act that Manchin does support. Manchin supports;

• The ban on political gerrymandering. This is huge.
• Mandating at least 15 days of early voting.’
• Making election day a holiday
• Making it a crime to spread false information about an election, such as dates and hours polls are open.

Other provisions he supports would make registration and absentee voting easier. And Stacey Abrams is saying, I’ll take it. To me, if they didn’t pass anything but a ban on political gerrymandering, that would be worth it.

Of course, none of this will mean anything if Manchin doesn’t get over his, um, ambivalence on the filibuster.

Update: Mitch has already shot Manchin down. Politico:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he believed all 50 Republicans would oppose Sen. Manchin’s (D-W.Va.) slimmed-down elections compromise, which focuses on expanding early voting and ending partisan gerrymandering in federal elections. And it’s not clear there’s a single Republican vote to even begin debate on the matter, potentially dooming Manchin’s proposals before they can even make it into the bill.

Even Romney and Murkowski are turning up their noses at Joe’s proposals.

Update: See Greg Sargent, Joe Manchin reaches out to Republicans, and they slap him in the face. Republicans were thrilled when they heard that Stacey Abrams had endorsed Manchin’s proposal. This is not because they admire Stacey Abrams.

Rather, they were thrilled because, as Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri candidly put it, they now get to rebrand Manchin’s compromise as “the Stacey Abrams substitute.”

“When Stacey Abrams immediately endorsed Senator Manchin’s proposal,” Blunt told reporters, “it became the Stacey Abrams substitute, not the Joe Manchin substitute.”

The careful observer will note that nothing substantive about the proposal itself changed when Abrams endorsed it. What changed is that Republicans now get to associate it with Abrams, rather than Manchin.

So that would be zero Republican votes for the Manchin compromise, I take it.

As I wrote yesterday, Senate Democrats are moving forward on two parallel tracks with infrastructure bills. At the moment, Chuck Shumer does intend to allow the “compromise” bill being cobbled together by five Republicans and five Democrats to be put forward for a vote, if it gets enough votes for cloture. At the same time, today the serious work of preparing a reconciliation bill that doesn’t require Republican votes is beginning in the Senate Budget Committee, chaired by Bernie Sanders.

Playing footsie with the compromise bill appears to be a means to give Joe Manchin room to vote for the reconciliation bill, if the compromise bill fails. He can say he gave bipartisanship his best shot.

But what if the compromise bill passes in the Senate? Which is possible if it gets through cloture. Jim Newell writes at Slate that the bad bill could freeze out the good bill.

Few Republicans were worried that they might look like suckers if they were to give Democrats a bipartisan “win” and then watch as Democrats proceeded to secure the rest of their agenda through reconciliation anyway. Their relative openness is guided by another political suspicion: the belief that making a limited bipartisan deal would prevent Democrats from having the votes to get the rest of what they want through reconciliation.

In other words, if the bad compromise bill passes, Manchin and other troglodytes — er, moderates — would be harder to pressure to vote for the good reconciliation bill.

How bad is the bad bill? Really bad.

The [compromise] proposal would offer about $579 billion in new spending for physical infrastructure. It would be paid for through some combination of indexing the gas tax to inflation, creating a new miles-traveled fee for users of electric vehicles, improving tax enforcement, repurposing certain unused COVID relief funds, and creating public-private partnerships.

Putting aside the fact that $579 billion doesn’t even amount to a down payment on what’s needed for physical infrastructure — increasing gas taxes instead of taxing corporations once again puts a tax burden on working folks rather than just the fat corporations that use those roads and bridges and other physical infrastructure to move goods.

And “repurposing certain unused COVID relief funds” is basically a ruse to strip funds from the American Rescue Plan that was signed into a law in March. See What The GOP’s Infrastructure Pay For Would Actually Mean For States And Cities by Josh Kovensky at Talking Points Memo. It’s true that much of the allocated covid relief money has not yet been spent. However, that’s not because there’s nothing to spend it on.

Funding for states and cities in the American Rescue Plan would be uniquely vulnerable to repurposing. The money is set to come in two tranches, with the second tranche arriving one year after the first.

What that money might go to depends on the jurisdiction, but it comes as states and cities shore up budgets that were depleted during the pandemic and rehire staff that were laid off because of the virus. It also includes plans for grappling with the longer-term consequences of the pandemic, in the form of programs for those suffering from long COVID, or funding for public health programs.

It also represents a marked increase in federal investment in local government that comes after decades of neglect.

Irma Esparza Diggs, director of federal advocacy for the National League of Cities, said that for many cities, the narrative of “too much” federal aid was overblown and that officials she spoke to were still searching for more funds to restart programs that were cut during the COVID recession.

St. Louis, for example, is still formulating plans for the money the city received in the relief package. Mayor Tishaura Jones just released her proposals for the money yesterday. So much has not been spent, but that’s not because it isn’t needed. Clawing that money back would be a disaster.

There is also a real possibility that such a bill would fail to pass in the House, which would leave us with nothing.

Greg Sargent, at least, is reassuring us that the reconciliation package won’t be substantially watered down.

In short, there’s a lot of wheeling and dealing left to do here. But all is not yet lost.

BOSTON – OCTOBER 16: This is a view of the rusted Long Island Bridge. (Photo by John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)