SIXTY-SEVEN
On April 21, around 4 p.m. in the afternoon, Clyburn invited Manchin to meet in his Capitol office. It would be a serious, working meeting. Both men would have their chiefs of staff present and their chief counsels. Six people in the room, three facing three, sitting on dark cherry-colored leather couches and chairs.
Unlike the Capitol rioters, who seemed to easily find his office, Manchin needed directions.
Speaker Pelosi’s “For the People Act,” called H.R. 1, was idling in the Senate after being passed by the House in March. It called for early voting to last at least for two weeks, and for states to do more to register voters.
As they settled into the couches, Clyburn was blunt. Manchin could keep his position, broadly speaking, on preserving the filibuster. But it was intolerable for him to hold to that hard line on voting rights. Manchin had to give on voting rights, a clear constitutional and moral issue.
“I have never asked that you change your mind about the filibuster,” Clyburn said. “But I would love to see the filibuster applied to constitutional rights in the same way we apply them to budgeting,” with the reconciliation, majority-vote process. “We have the carve-out.
“Reconciliation. That’s a word that applies more neatly to constitutional issues than it does to budgeting.”
Manchin listened but did not make any promises. He was pleasant. We’ll take a look.
“Look,” Clyburn told him, “you don’t have to be a racist country to tolerate racism. And that’s what we’re doing.” He said the GOP voting proposals in the states were undoubtedly racist.
Clyburn said he knew Strom Thurmond, the late segregationist senator from his home state of South Carolina. He said even he and Thurmond were able to reconcile their differences. “Strom and I did get along very, very well.”
Manchin said he was not aware of the pair’s past work together.
“We worked together to do things that needed to be done in South Carolina,” Clyburn said. “We still do with his children and his widow. I still work with his family. In fact, Strom had a sister named Gertrude,” whom Clyburn had known from their work in state government decades ago.
“Gertrude and I worked together in the same office. Our desks were just about four or five steps apart. And he said to me, all the time, ‘My sister, Gertrude, really loves you.’ And I said, ‘Well, show your love for your sister and let’s do this together.’ And we did a lot of things together,” working on securing funds for their state.
Clyburn brought up his mentor, Judge Richard Fields. He was still alive. One hundred years old. He had gone to a historically Black college in West Virginia.
“Bluefield State,” Manchin said.
“I remember when West Virginia State was 100 percent Black,” Clyburn said. “These schools are now 80, 85 percent white.”
Manchin said he wanted to be helpful. “I’m all for doing what is necessary to preserve and protect voting rights.” He said the sweeping law passed in Georgia in March, signed by Republican governor Brian Kemp, disappointed him. That law restricted mail-in voting and beefed up voter identification requirements, although Republicans argued it expanded access by increasing early, in-person voting by one day.
What goes around, comes around, Manchin said. If we change the rules, we do something, then the Republicans are in charge and they come back and do the same thing. I have a hard time believing we couldn’t find Republicans on the other side of the aisle who agree we need to have fair, accessible and secure elections.
Well, Clyburn said, I’m just making this suggestion. Find a way to get it done.
The meeting lasted an hour. Manchin was friendly as he left, ever the amiable former quarterback. But he again made no commitments.
Clyburn told his aides he would keep at it.
Clyburn was increasingly disappointed and outraged. This was the biggest step backward in decades.
In all, nearly 400 bills to restrict voting had been introduced nationwide since the election. Since January, nearly 20 new laws had been enacted and dozens more had passed or were pending in state legislative chambers.
A GOP-pushed audit of the vote in Arizona’s Maricopa County was also becoming a focal point for Trump and his allies, with Giuliani engaging state legislators and officials. In Georgia, Republicans were clamoring for more audits of hundreds of thousands of votes in the Atlanta area.
“We’re going to make it a felony for you to give somebody a bottle of water if they stand in a line for eight hours to vote? What the hell is that? Come on,” Clyburn vented.
By June, Manchin had not moved on the filibuster. He had issued a three-page memo as a foundation for more negotiations on a bipartisan voting bill. Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Democrat, said Manchin’s memo was a “first and important step” to finding a compromise.
On June 22, Democrats failed to secure the necessary 60 votes to pass the House’s voting rights legislation.
A silver lining, some Democrats said, the issue was now front and center. It could be a keystone for Biden and the party in the 2022 campaign.
Clyburn wanted more.
“Democracy is on fire and the Senate is fiddling!” he said to his aides as the Democrats struggled. “The head of the orchestra is a man named McConnell.”