Thread by @thomasafine

My default assumption for both Manchin and Sinema is that they are compromised by some right wing entity, and therefore will not yield on core Trump issues no matter what.

They're going to act exactly like Graham, Nunes, Cruz, Jordan, etc., until our democracy is dead.

If you are willing to entertain the possibility or likelihood that some members of Congress are compromised, then the surprising part here isn't that they got to a couple of Democrats too. The surprising part is that anyone ever thought Democrats would be immune.

Sinema and Manchin both broke party lines to confirm Barr, too. There's no common thread of issues or policy between that vote and this one.

Except that they're both the highest priority votes for Trump in terms of keeping him out of prison.

I guess this all leads to a question: if this assumption is correct, how do we move forward? If it is literally impossible to pry lose from Manchin and Sinema votes that will harm Trump, how does the Democratic party move forward?

One possible answer is that we need to split off a dozen GOP Senators that aren't corrupt. Remote odds, but better odds than the zero chance I'm assuming for Manchin and Sinema.

The other answer is that we rely on the courts to block all these state voter suppression laws. And then we just win bigger in 2022 than we did in 2020.

The odds for this are looking remote anyway.

If there's still a legal battle in progress over the Constitutionality of a state law, the default is that the law stands until it is overturned, correct?

That's very bad for the second option.

Wow I totally forgot about this. Trump explicitly said he had blackmail info on a Dem Senator (though this was after the Barr confirmation, or the Kavanaugh one for that matter). h/t @VioletaQSmith

https://twitter.com/donwinslow/status/1282778261471158272

And I mention Kavanaugh because when he was nominated and the WH refused to release the documents that they held (as has been the custom), initially all the Dem Senators refused to meet with Kavanaugh... except for Manchin.

And actually the video above is from a few days before Kavanaugh's confirmation. It's from Oct. 1, 2018. On Oct. 5 Manchin broke with Democrats on cloture, and on Oct. 6 Manchin broke with Democrats to confirm Kavanaugh.

businessinsider.com/trump-threat-d…

So I'm not sure why @donwinslow tweeted the video a couple years later implying it was actually about a Republican when all evidence is that Trump leveraged Manchin for those votes.