The DemPublican Party!

Voting rights become an existential crisis for the US Democrats

Phoenix, Sunday,

They're Washington's odd couple.

Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona) and Joe Manchin (West Virginia). On the face of it they couldn't be more different: a grey-haired and conventional businessman and an unconventional blonde who posts pictures of herself on Instagram sipping Sangria. But the two of them are united on the need to stop their fellow Democrats from protecting the fundamental right to vote.

In the past year, Senate Republicans have already blocked voting rights bills four times. Unless the Senate rules are changed, since Democrats have a tenuous 50-person majority, they need 10 Republicans to join them in order to overcome any filibuster. At stake are voting rights bills as well as many other Democratic priorities like gun control and protections for workers' rights.

So what sort of people are the two naughty senators, who seem to be risking the collapse of their own party? Take the voting rights bill. If passed, it would have been an important check on Red states' attempts to limit America's colored communities' ability to vote. Although the bill was poorly drafted, certain elements should have found approval even amongst the Republicans! For example:

• Protecting early voting

 

• Preventing the gerrymandering
of electoral districts

• Guaranteeing access to vote by
mail and...

• Preventing politically motivated
tampering with the all-important
elector rolls

What not to like? And yet it seemed to all the Republican senators and these two maverick Democrats, there was a lot not to like. The native Arizonan said she was opposed to "actions that would deepen our divisions". Likewise, Manchin warned it would: "pour fuel on the fire of political whiplash and dysfunction that is tearing this nation apart."

Manchin (74) is politically way left of the state that he represents. But, West Virginia is so far right, that he has to appeal to the Republicans to survive. From a family of Italian immigrants, he's really a moderate Republican with a coal plant (something squarely in the target of Democrats everywhere) with assets estimated at $8 600 000. If guessing someone's political mindset was based on their money, Manchin is holding a flashing neon sign.

Sinema (44), makes considerable play of her poor background, telling voters her family lived in an abandoned gas station in Florida. She calls herself "the only member of Congress who was homeless as a child". Mind you, at one time, her family lived in a five-bedroom ranch house at the foot of the Santa Catalina Mountains.

Problems only started when her father lost his job amid the 1980s recession. However, public records show he was also fighting complaints from clients, tax debts - and censure by the State Bar of Arizona.

The two senators both seem to be very different characters: one very conventional, while the other likes to push boundaries and appear as the odd one out. But right now they're both causing trouble.