(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Multiple layers of irony were present in Charleston, W.Va., as seven left-wing activists were arrested at a sit-in to protest Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin’s opposition to the filibuster.
“Every piece of legislation is being blocked,” complained Rylee Haught of the West Virginia Coalition to End the Filibuster, according to the Center Square.
In the delusional leftist mind, Manchin’s current party affiliation entitles Democrats in the evenly-split Senate to have their demands met on any number of extremist wish-list items—including federal oversight of the election process, trillion-dollar spending packages in a recessionary economy, codifying the federal abortion mandate into law and enacting radical gun-control.
Even though Manchin’s votes in opposition of such bills puts Democrats in the minority—and an expected red wave in the 2022 midterms further underscores their lack of mandate—they have reacted indignantly with tantrums after being deprived of these whims.
Some have gone so far as to claim the culprit is a culture of “systemic” racism that constantly thwarts the caprices of entitled 20something activists.
Among those now asserting that the Senate minority’s lone check on power has become a racist relic of the “Jim Crow” era is President Joe Biden—despite his having fondly reminisced about working with racist Democrat segregationists, and even having previously used the filibuster to block a black, female Republican judge from a Supreme Court nomination.
“This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle,” Biden bizzarely mused in a March 2021 press conference attacking red-state efforts to pass common-sense election integrity laws and close vote-fraud loopholes exploited during the 2020 election.
However, when the filibuster worked to Democrats’ advantage—as it did in the first two years of former President Donald Trump’s administration—all Democrats appeared to be staunch proponents of it.
In 2017, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., cosponsored legislation to preserve the filibuster alongside Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. The pair penned a letter to grandstand about their symbolic gesture, even though the filibuster was in no danger of being dissolved under GOP control.
“This letter demonstrates that a majority of the Senate, both Republicans and Democrats, can come together to protect an important tradition of the Senate that recognizes the rights of the minority and makes bipartisan legislation more likely,” they wrote.
At the recent West Virginia protest, the activists conducted a sit-in in front of the Robert C. Byrd United States Courthouse, named in honor of the longtime Democrat Senator and former Ku Klux Klan leader—who famously used the filibuster to forestall a Republican-led passage of key civil-rights legislation in the 1950s and ’60s, alongside Sen. Al Gore Sr., D-Tenn.
At his 2010 funeral, Byrd was eulogized by both Biden and then-President Barack Obama.
The significance of the Byrd federal courthouse was not lost on the activists, the Center Square reported.
Haught said the activists chose it because Byrd was a senator who made a lot of mistakes, but changed, according to the article. They hoped Manchin would do the same.
However, Manchin also has used Byrd to justify his defense of the filibuster.
In a January statement, Manchin recounted a May 2010 hearing on the filibuster, just before Byrd’s death, when Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-NY, then chair of the Senate Rules Committee, asked Byrd to testify due to his “unsurpassed knowledge” on the subject.
“Senator Byrd began by quoting James Madison. Madison said that the purpose of the Senate was ‘first, to protect the people against their rulers …,’ and that the Senate serves as a ‘necessary fence against such danger,’” Manchin noted.
“Senator Byrd testified that, ‘the right to filibuster anchors this necessary fence,’” Manchin continued. “He concluded with, ‘We must never, ever, ever, ever tear down the only wall, the necessary fence, that this nation has against the excesses of the executive branch and the resultant haste and tyranny of the majority.’”
