“Democrats Voting Rights Debacle”

Andrew Prokup for Vox:

Sometimes there is no plan.

Democrats’ big voting rights push is headed for a brick wall in the Senate — again. To get their bill past the filibuster, they need all 50 Senate Democrats to support changing the chamber’s rules. And Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) still refuse to do so.

With failure imminent, finger-pointing and second-guessing about Democrats’ voting rights strategy has become rampant. “Has there ever been a legislative campaign this dumb, doomed and disastrous from the beginning?” one Democratic campaign professional griped to me, speaking anonymously to more freely criticize his party’s strategy.

It’s become clear that the party never had a plausible plan for success on voting rights. Congressional leaders, activists, and outside groups have mostly been in lockstep trying to unite Democrats around a sweeping legislative package, then charging full steam ahead into a filibuster. The hope was, apparently, that persuasion or pressure would spur Manchin and Sinema to abolish or weaken the filibuster, even though they’d repeatedly vowed they wouldn’t.

All along, some Democrats have been quietly skeptical on both tactical and substantive grounds, as I wrote last year. They argued that the likely impact of the bills for “saving democracy” was exaggerated, and that their chances of success were far lower than leaders were admitting. An adviser to a prominent Democratic donor worried that discussions on the topic were becoming “exercises in unreality,” per an email obtained by Politico….

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