Klobuchar says agreement is very close in For The People Act

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I mean, what choice do they have? Manchin more than any Democratic senator is at the mercy of a very Republican legislature who will make sure it's impossible for him to get reelected.

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I mean, what choice do they have? Manchin more than any Democratic senator is at the mercy of a very Republican legislature who will make sure it's impossible for him to get reelected.

How do you figure that? I've got news for you: for over 100 years, since the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment, U.S. Senators have not had any reason at all to keep their state's legislature happy and contended. The only people in West Virginia Manchin has to worry about are the voters.

Duh, because Republicans all over the country are passing voter restriction bills targeted at reducing Democratic votes. West Virginia barely has the black voters who make the most inviting targets, but the WV legislature will still try to do what they can.

And yes, Manchin is very likely to lose in 2024 regardless. But the WV legislature will raise that chance from 90% to 100% if they're allowed to.

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This is well-written essay on the subject of voting rights:

Analysis: Biden is following a script that once doomed Black voters and made the rise of Jim Crow possible

Does anyone agree with his claim that President Biden and his fellow Democrats in Congress are following in the footsteps of their Reconstruction-era Republican predecessors when they ultimately decided that their African American supporters were expendable?  

No. Biden is working hard to get this done, and it looks like he's succeeding.

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At this point, if Sinema and Manchin aren’t going to end the filibuster, they deserve every piece of crap coming their way. Everything the GOP has done since 1/6, all of the Gerrymandering they will do next year in Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, etc should be clear enough that it’s time. But no, I’d rather be bipartisan at the expense of people’s rights.

Neither Sinema nor Manchin are dependent on black voters for their re-election campaigns, since they compose such a miniscule proportion of the population (and the electorate) in Arizona and West Virginia.  So to them, African Americans are indeed expendable.  

That loss we suffered in North Carolina last November is really starting to bite....   

I mean, WV has 80,000 (5%) blacks and AZ has over 400,000 (6%). That's not nothing, as both of them are probably going to win close if they win at all.

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If President Biden (whose lead moderate senators like Joe Manchin generally follow) still refuses to support either the elimination of the filibuster or at least a carve-out for voting rights, then all that is really happening is political kabuki theater.  Biden is merely giving speeches full of empty words in support of voting rights, while congressional Democrats are holding empty, symbolic votes (if that) on voting legislation that everyone knows will never see the President's desk.  The only likely lesson that will be imparted to black voters is that they've been taken for a ride, that they are not important enough to President Biden despite the fact that they are the main reason he won the presidential nomination in the first place. I suspect that Biden is too busy trying to ingratiate himself with white working class voters in the Rust Belt to be concerned with the very real likelihood that minority voters in key Sun Belt states will not be able to exercise their right to vote as a result of Republican voter suppression laws that Biden evidently doesn't care enough about to eliminate or alter the filibuster.      

Harsh but fair.