Manchin, Sinema pan Harris over call to scrap filibuster

Sens. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) sharply criticized Vice President Harris after she said on Tuesday that she wants to scrap the legislative filibuster in order to codify Roe v. Wade.

Manchin, one of the foremost backers of the 60-vote threshold, told CNN that he will not support Harris’s bid for the White House. He said it would be a massive mistake to move ahead with those plans if Democrats keep hold of the upper chamber.

“Shame on her,” Manchin, who is retiring at year’s end, told CNN. “She knows the filibuster is the Holy Grail of democracy. It’s the only thing that keeps us talking and working together. If she gets rid of that, then this would be the House on steroids.”

In a statement, the West Virginia senator, who left the Democratic Party to become an Independent in May, added that the filibuster “stabilizes our democracy, promotes bipartisan cooperation and protects our nation from partisan whiplash and dysfunction.”

“I have always said: ‘if you can’t change your mind, you can’t change anything’ and I am hopeful that the Vice President remains open to doing just that,” he said.

Sinema agreed.

“To state the supremely obvious, eliminating the filibuster to codify Roe v Wade also enables a future Congress to ban all abortion nationwide,” Sinema, who left the Democratic Party in 2022, wrote on X.

“What an absolutely terrible, shortsighted idea,” she added.

Harris has been outspoken for years about her support for scrapping the legislative filibuster. She said in 2019 that she wanted to done away with in order to pass the Green New Deal.

She also added in 2022 that it should be nixed in order to codify abortion and voting rights. 

Her comments on Tuesday came during an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio.

“I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe,” Harris said. “To actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom, and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do.”

President Biden called for a carve-out in the filibuster in order to reinstate Roe after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. 

Manchin and Sinema both opposed the push. They are both retiring from the upper chamber at the end of the year. 

The West Virginia senator had been inching closer to supporting Harris’s bid and was hoping to meet with her to discuss myriad topics. 

“I’m never going to say never,” he said about possibly endorsing her earlier in the month.