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Joe Manchin Scuttles Democrats' Plans on Abortion

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As I wrote on Wednesday morning, Democrats losing their minds over the coming overturning of Roe v. Wade have been desperately searching for a way out. While their best hope is for Chief Justice John Roberts to somehow lure one of the five conservatives to his side, another ploy is to “codify” a “right” to abortion at the federal level.

Sen. Chuck Schumer has already come out and announced a vote on a bill that will legalize abortion through birth. In order to pass it, Democrats have been stumping to blow up the filibuster, a common refrain when it comes to anything they can’t otherwise pass in a legitimate manner.

Unfortunately for the pro-abortion fanatics, Sen. Joe Manchin has other ideas. He came flying in off the top rope and nuked not just eliminating the filibuster, but he’s a “no” on the bill itself.

This is a complete embarrassment for Schumer and the Democrat Party. Their cardinal issue is abortion, mainly because they have nothing else to run on, and they aren’t even going to get 50 votes on their big codification bill. Worse for them, what if Jon Tester or some other “moderate” senator also votes against it and this turns into a wipeout? The failure of the bill also makes a lot of Democrats look like idiots for once again stumping to blow up the filibuster when they don’t even have the votes to pass the bill regardless.

At some point, you lose your political capital regarding the push to get rid of the filibuster. If every single issue is worthy of blowing it up over, then onlookers are going to get the hint that the Democrats simply don’t care about our system of government and will do anything to get their way. Don’t like a Supreme Court decision? Pack the court. Don’t like our immigration laws? Want to pass a massive spending boondoggle? Abolish the filibuster. That’s not going to play well with most Americans.

The other thing that strikes me about this is how politically stupid the Democrat leadership is. They had a chance here to actually win an argument over Roe by proposing a limited codification that essentially protected abortion in the first trimester. Would I agree with that? No, but most Americans would have. That also would have garnered Manchin’s vote and several votes on the GOP side. Instead, because Democrats are so beholden to the far-left, they decided to propose a bill that allows abortion at a level only a small percentage of people support.

The failure theater on display here is enough to make Republicans blush. Schumer knows he’s going to lose this vote, but he’s naive enough to think that getting everyone on record will benefit Democrats. I just don’t think it will. Instead, I believe it’s going to provide fodder on how radical the left is. I guess we’ll find out.

West Virginia's Primary Was an Endorsement Showdown Between President Trump and Joe Manchin and You Know Who Won That One

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Last night two GOP incumbents faced off in the primary election for West Virginia’s new second district. The candidates were David McKinley, who was first elected to the House in WV-01 in 2010 by flipping a seat held by Democrats for over 40 years, and Alex Mooney, elected to the House in WV-02 2014. (Full Disclosure, I know Alex Mooney. He was my state senator before running for a House seat. I collaborated with him on some work when the RedMaryland site I founded was still operating. I am an Alex Mooney supporter.) Two factors necessitated the head-to-head match-up. First, West Virginia lost a seat during the reapportionment process, and the new map put Mooney and McKinley in the newly drawn WV-01; fivethirtyeight.com has excellent before/after maps. The second factor was McKinley’s decision not to retire–he’s 75–and create a contested primary. This is not to say a 75-year-old can’t run for office, but just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.

By all rights, McKinley should have been a shoo-in. Mooney’s old WV-02 was almost totally combined with WV-03; the new WV-01 was basically McKinley’s old district, only a little more compact.

During the course of the primary, the race also became a test of strength for two heavyweights: Donald Trump and West Virginia’s Democrat Senator Joe Manchin.

Mooney received President Trump’s endorsement in November. The endorsement, in my opinion, came from three factors. President Trump tends to endorse younger candidates; Mooney was an unabashed Trump supporter from the early days of 2016, and McKinley was one of 13 GOP incumbents President Trump has pledged to defeat because they voted for Biden’s boondoggle “infrastructure” bill. In fact, Mooney got the Trump endorsement only a week after vowing war on RINOs. McKinley is also a climate change proponent. He voted to authorize the January 6 Self-Beclowning Committee, and he’s very pro-alphabet people, so President Trump’s decision process can’t have been all that difficult.

When Mooney started battering McKinley over his support for the infrastructure bill, he got his own endorser: Democrat Senator Joe Manchin.

For the past two years, a lot of conservatives have developed a man-crush on Joe Manchin. As far as I can tell, it’s not so much based on what Machin is for or has accomplished as him providing a critical vote to prevent some stupidity by the Biden bunch. Still, it smacks of desperation when a Republican candidate for Congress calls for a lifeline from a Democrat senator when running in a primary election in a district he’s represented for 12 years.

In the end, Mooney won the race by nearly 20 points.

If anyone doubts the value of Trump vs. Manchin endorsement in West Virginia, take a close look at last night’s results.

President Trump has endorsed nearly 130 candidates in the 2022 election cycle. About 50 have won, and one has lost (The Trump Endorsed Candidate in Nebraska Suffers a Loss, and the Legacy Media Wants It to Be a Referendum on Trump). As Pennsylvania and Georgia voters go to the polls in the coming days, I think he’ll get more losses. Be that as it may, the media should be able to stop pondering if President Trump still influences the GOP. He does.

Susan Collins Dashes Democrat Delusions of 'Codifying' Abortion Into Law

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With “abortion rights” taking center stage over the last week after a leak signaled the Supreme Court is ready to overturn Roe v. Wade, Democrats have been making all kinds of wild statements about what they are going to do next.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren appeared to have a stroke on camera on Tuesday, as she gyrated about, proclaiming how she was going to “fight” the probable Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe. Meanwhile, Rep. Cori Bush proclaimed that not only should abortion rights be “codified” by Congress, but that the government should force pro-life individuals to pay for abortion services.

But on the topic of codifying the ability to kill babies in the womb into the nation’s laws, it appears Democrats have gotten out over their skis again. Sen. Susan Collins, who has criticized Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked majority decision overturning Roe, is apparently a no-go, citing a multitude of issues.

I’m constantly amazed at how politically stupid the modern Democrat party is, especially under the tutelage of President Joe Biden and Sen. Chuck Schumer. It is at least conceivable to write a law that Collins would support. After all, she’s a pro-abortion zealot, despite being a “Republican” from the blue state of Maine. Yet, instead of sitting down with her and coming up with a narrow bill that contains some moderation and nuance, Democrats went full “Leroy Jenkins” again, not even stopping to consider that they could lose the votes of some who otherwise might side with them.

This is exactly what happened with the so-called “Build Back Better” bill. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema were ready to hand their party leaders and the president a trillion-dollar spending bill that checked many liberal boxes. Instead of just taking the easy win, though, Democrats included pro-abortion measures that turned off Manchin and tax increase measures that turned off Sinema. In the end, they got nothing. No lessons were learned, I guess.

In this latest case, Collins rightly notes that the language in the pro-Roe bill does not even bother to protect religious institutions from having to perform abortions. That would be such an easy thing to fix, but Democrats won’t do it because they are so beholden to their far-left base.

To be sure, though, I’m not giving Collins much, if any, credit here. I find her position on abortion and her overall cowardice as a legislator to be pathetic. The only reason I don’t spend much time criticizing her is that she’s from a blue state. In that sense, she’s a necessary evil. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, on the other hand, is a totally different story, and she needs to be booted from office this year.

Regardless, it’s worth paying attention to just how little political skill the current Democrat Party leaders have. They had a chance to secure multiple Republican votes for a codification of abortion into law, securing at least a partial PR victory, but instead did the bidding of radicals. I’ll go further and suggest Joe Manchin won’t vote for their bill either. Heck, it might not even get 50 votes, which would be hilarious given the push to kill the filibuster over this. This entire spectacle is the Democrat version of “failure theater.”

Even After SCOTUS Leak, Manchin and Sinema Stand Firm on Filibuster

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The filibuster will apparently live on for the time being, with Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) stating they have no plans to vote on ending the practice. Their decisions come down as the country is embroiled in controversy over the leaked Supreme Court opinion striking down Roe v Wade.

Without Manchin’s and Sinema’s votes, Democrats have no chance to nuke the filibuster. Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Manchin said, “The filibuster is a protection of democracy.” And Sinema tweeted:

When Sinema refers to “protections in the Senate safeguarding against the erosion of women’s access to health care,” she’s referring to the filibuster. Leftists are not happy with the pair:

The filibuster is the Senate rule which, when invoked by one of its members, essentially requires a supermajority of 60 votes to pass legislation. Explains History.com:

A filibuster is a political strategy in which a senator speaks—or threatens to speak—for hours on end to delay efforts to vote for a bill. The unusual tactic takes advantage of a U.S. Senate rule that says a senator, once recognized on the floor, may speak on an issue without being impeded by anyone. While various rule changes have tempered the filibuster’s power over the past century, it still offers unique leverage to the minority political party in the Senate.

The filibuster has been under constant attack in recent years by the “Squad,” Sen. Chuck Schumer, and others–attacks that only intensified after the SCOTUS leak:

The filibuster has been integral to Republicans’ strategy in recent years, and even the threat of it helped derail the $1.9 trillion Build Back Better bill. It’s also stood in the way of the Left’s urgent desire to pack the courts, something they would probably immediately aim for should the filibuster be abolished.

The filibuster has been around since 1887 and has prevented hyper-partisans of both parties from cramming radical legislation down the throats of Americans. Its pop culture status was cemented when actor James Stewart appeared in the 1939 film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, where Stewart plays a young idealistic senator who talks for nearly 24 hours to delay a vote on a corrupt public works bill.

If Chuck Schumer and others succeed in getting it canned, they can overcome the 50–50 party split in the Senate and pass almost anything they want (with the help of Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote). If that happens, expect court-packing, trillion-dollar spending bills, maybe more “Disinformation” Boards—who knows what would be on the table.

Thanks to Manchin and Sinema, the filibuster looks safe for now, and we can all breathe a little easier.

Grassley calls out Biden's ATF pick for wanting “expansive gun control”

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The White House is adamant in portraying former U.S. Attorney Steve Dettelbach as a non-partisan, non-ideological, middle-of-the-road nominee to head up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, but there’s a big problem with that effort: Dettelbach is actually none of those things.

The former U.S. Attorney is also a former Democratic candidate for Ohio’s Attorney General, and his 2018 campaign (in which he ended up losing to current A.G. Dave Yost) was replete with calls for new gun control laws and digs at Second Amendment activists and organizations. NRA-ILA recently highlighted a few of the positions Dettelbach took on the campaign trail that are already having an impact on some of the senators who’ll be casting a vote on his confirmation.

Like Chipman, Dettelbach is a dedicated gun controller with a background that proves he would be neither fair nor objective as head of ATF. When running for Ohio Attorney General in 2018, Dettelbach endorsed gun bans, restrictions on lawful firearm transfers, and further expansion of prohibitions on who can lawfully possess a firearm. In short, it’s unclear what gun control measures Dettelbach doesn’t support.

This led NRA-PVF to award Dettelbach an “F” for his positions on the right to keep and bear arms. Notably, Michael Bloomberg’s astroturf gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety (David Chipman’s former employer) endorsed Dettelbach in his bid to become Ohio’s Attorney General.

The main difference between Dettelbach and Chipman when it comes to gun control is that one of them received the endorsement of gun control groups and the other actually received a paycheck. As far as their views, however, there doesn’t appear to be any difference at all, and that has the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee decidedly unimpressed with Biden’s pick. Sen. Charles Grassley not only criticized Joe Biden’s myopic focus on “ghost guns” on Tuesday, but took a few swipes at Dettelbach as well.

The Iowa lawmaker is also casting doubt on Biden’s recently nominated director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Steven Dettelbach, whom Grassley says “lack(s) awareness of the circumstances surrounding legal gun acquisition” and favors “expansive gun control.”

“A director must, at a minimum, demonstrate that he or she respects the Second Amendment rights of Americans and can deal fairly with the firearms industry,” Grassley said in a press release Tuesday.

Grassley in the release also highlights what he calls Dettelbach’s “social media activism” and suggests it raises a red flag for his abilities to perform a role that includes “having an appreciation for thee role that firearms play in the lives of Americans,” as well as serving as a liaison to the firearms business community.

I hope Grassley cc’ed his colleagues Joe Manchin and Angus King on his press release. The pair were instrumental in defeating David Chipman’s nomination as ATF director last year, and so far have not committed to supporting Dettelbach.

I find it hard to believe that after suffering such an embarrassing and high-profile defeat, the White House wouldn’t have received at least a tentative commitment from Manchin and King, but then again, I’ve seen a lot of inexplicable decisions come out of the White House since Biden was inaugurated. And the voters in West Virginia and Maine also have a chance to weigh in, so even if the pair previously indicated their support, if their constituents are overwhelmingly opposed to Dettelbach that could sway how Manchin and King end up casting their vote.

Biden could have nominated someone who doesn’t have a history of vocally calling for new gun laws, like acting ATF Director Marvin Richardson, but that wouldn’t have appeased the gun control lobby, so he’s once again rolling the dice on a candidate that should be unacceptable to at least 51 senators. Now it’s up to gun owners to make their voices heard, and to demand our senators reject any and all candidates (including Dettelbach) who would turn the ATF into a gun control group with law enforcement powers.