Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have been pilloried quite a bit recently and deservedly so. They helped torpedo President Biden’s BBB plan. I remember the mild threat Manchin made about possibly becoming an Independent and Caucus with Republicans. Sinema was just recently censured by Arizona Democrats which means that she’s likely to face a strong challenger in a Primary.
How would do you think this could affect the Senate and Biden’s moves as President down the line?
I’ve worried about this for quite some time. Any death, any departure from a single Democratic Senator, flips control right back to McConnell.
I doubt Manchin would do it. But I worry about Sinema. She’s a loose cannon, in my book.
Either or both of them could flip to independent (or even Republican), and choose to caucus with the GOP, at any time. If either of them did so, the Senate effectively would become controlled by the Republicans, and Biden wouldn’t get a thing done this year by Congress.
After her recent censure, and the browbeating she took from Biden, she could use leaving as a way to hold Biden hostage.
That’s always the problem with a 50/50 split in the Senate. Any one of them can choose to hold the entire party hostage.
If they did that, they’d have no leverage whatsoever. It’s not like the Republicans would give a shit about them once they jumped ship.
I thought Biden just had to play hardball with them and they’d fall in line?
Yikes! Breyer is retiring.
These two are the key to a liberal replacement Justice. What a mess we have! Repubs will woo them with everything they’ve got. Dems got nuthin, apparently, or we would have passed BBB. Can we rely on Sinema and Manchin to be responsible? Do Dems have any leverage? [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/stephen-breyer-supreme-court-retire/2022/01/26/02a47db0-ace1-11eb-b476-c3b287e52a01_story.html]
It would accelerate the Republican takeover of the senate by 11 months, I guess. If they leave before Breyer retires, we’ll have an 8 member Supreme Court for a while.
It’s OK to reduce the size of the Supreme Court but scandalous to increase it.
Bingo. If Manchin flips to R, he becomes one of dozens, instead of what he is now, which is one of two linchpins. He is not stupid. He won’t do this.
Sinema, on the other hand, is wildly unpredictable. Nothing she’s doing makes any sense except in a theatrical “look at me!” kind of way. I don’t think she’d flip, but I wouldn’t put money on it.
IMO, her goal is to ride out her term, loudly announce that she’s not seeking reelection because REASONS, and then land a cushy lobbying job.
Insofar as there’s a possible rational motivation, yeah, I think you’ve got it.
That said, if that’s her plan, she seems unaware that she is damaging her future marketability as a coherent and trustworthy policy advocate by so emphatically establishing herself as an epic-level unreliable loose cannon during her actual term.
so she IS planning on joining the Republicans?
Is there not one Republican who would take a hard look at the madness that has taken hold of the party of Ike, Rockefeller, Gerald Ford and decide to switch? Mitt, Susan, Lisa, those so-called moderates - or they seemed to be once, but nobody wants to cross Mitch anymore. It seems hopeless, but if I lived in Maine, I’d beg Susan Collins to think about her legacy and what she could do for the country, poll numbers be damned.
Done.
Interesting timing.
But does he have any political plans? I thought he decided not to run for re-election.
If he isn’t running for reelection it’s hard to care if he goes from D to I.
He declined to run in the Democratic primary for his Senate seat. But WV has a later deadline for candidates to file to run as an independent, and both his Senate seat and the Governor’s office (which he previously held) are on the ballot this fall.
I find it hard to believe that he would make this change now if he didn’t have some reason to do so. I hope he does run for either office, both are guaranteed to go to MAGA Republicans otherwise.