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Brian Beutler Profile picture
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16 Jun, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Manchin wins over @rickhasen. slate.com/news-and-polit…
My main thought here is the concessions to Republicans *have to be contingent on them voting for the bill*, and if they don’t, the filibuster has to go, and ideally those provisions have to go, too. Otherwise this is all just a bunch of suckers wasting each others’ time.
This is just basic negotiating, it’s what Republicans do, and not only that Manchin *knows* this is what they do.
Nothing we learned about Manchin today (his 1/6 operating, his S1 counterproposal) are the actions of a person who believes “the filibuster should never change” is a tenable position.

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More from @brianbeutler

Brian Beutler Profile picture
16 Jun
Haha cool cool.
It’s ok I didn’t want to see the records anyhow and it’s not like we have a right to them or that Trump was actually the president for four years, y’know?
Seriously how do they come to this position and not feel completely self-defeated? abcnews.go.com/Politics/summi…
Read 4 tweets
Brian Beutler Profile picture
10 Jun
Similar thoughts here. mailchi.mp/crooked.com/bi…

There’s another dimension to this, which is the creation of a false dichotomy between Bold Truth Telling and Lying, as if the craft of writing made it impossible not to engage in Epic Media Lab Leak Fiasco hyperbole without lying.
The lab-leak thing in particular is an example of a line of critique that has a grain of truth to it, but has been exaggerated by critics who are very invested in the appearance of rectitude and not at all invested in whether their overwrought criticisms will spark moral panic.
I’d say intelligent critics have an ethical obligation to consider how their word choices will be exploited by propagandists, which runs right alongside their ethical obligation to tell the truth. Refusing to consider the former is actually a kind of laziness in writing.
Read 6 tweets
Brian Beutler Profile picture
9 Jun
Watching the panicky Catastrophic Lab-Leak Fiasco Failure debate continue to play out, I’ve found it useful to imagine how the WMD debate would’ve played out in 2002 if Twitter had existed, and Bush et al were widely understood to be shameless liars on the scale of the Trumpers.
My sense is it would’ve developed differently, but along similar lines. Bush would’ve asserted the existence of WMD, nearly all liberals would’ve assumed he was lying, some in media would’ve overstated their certainty about the unknowable and called the WMD allegation “debunked.”
Then, Bush-allied intelligence sources would’ve planted stories about Iraqi scientists getting mysteriously ill (or whatever) in the Wall Street Journal (or wherever), and a posse of liberals would’ve arisen to say The Media’s WMD Fiasco Is A Crisis.
Read 7 tweets
Brian Beutler Profile picture
8 Jun
Biden’s assertion that he could persuade actual Republicans to play fair was central to his campaign, which the Nates of the world fawned over as the most skillful political showcase in many years.
This voguish liberal idea that all political decisions do and rightly should flow formulaically from static polling data is one of the most insipid and destructive of the past decade.
Polling data says talking about persuasion is popular —> praise Biden for talking about persuasion

Polling data says Biden isn’t popular enough among those he needs to persuade —> absolve Biden for not being persuasive
Read 5 tweets
Brian Beutler Profile picture
4 Jun
I’ve found centrist-Dem insistence on seeking permission from Republicans to govern maddening forever, but the current context makes the made-up Manchin/Sinema defense of the filibuster extra offensive.
Contrast to 2009: Back when Dems were debating the ACA; they clearly should’ve abolished the filibuster or used the budget-reconciliation process to pass a better bill. But they didn’t want to, and the biggest risk they faced as a result was breaking a campaign promise.
That would’ve been terrible and embarrassing, but fundamentally it would’ve left things unchanged. Parties faceplant sometimes. It happens. It happened to Dems in 1993 on the same issue!
Read 10 tweets
Brian Beutler Profile picture
25 May
Significant that they're trying to use their leverage as filibuster-reform swing votes to force the GOP's hand, but it'll actually be a very bad outcome if they succeed, Republicans drop their filibuster, and Congress establishes this doomed-to-fail commission.
Manchin and Sinema will say “see, we did a bipartisanship, the filibuster is good,” McConnell and McCarthy will sabotage the commission by appointing, like, Ratcliffe, Grenell, Mukasey, and Kash Patel, and the oversight committees will wash their hands of the whole insurrection.
Fortunately, as @jonfavs pointed out in a fruitless effort to calm me the fuck down, the public whip count looks definitive, and Trump has called on Republicans to vote no, so hard to see them taking the offramp Manchin and Sinema have offered. But it is an offramp!
Read 4 tweets

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