Senator Joe Manchin, the “Hamlet of the Potomac” when it comes to supporting Democratic priorities in the U.S. Senate, has a friend at one of the largest trade association PACs in America. Federal Election Commission records show the small-state senator got two $2,500 campaign donations from the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies PAC in March, just before the end of the quarterly reporting deadline.
The questions I emailed Jimi Grande, the senior vice president at the PAC, follow. I will update this brief article if Grande responds. The PAC website lists his phone number as (202) 580-6745.
- Why did your PAC donate money to Sen. Manchin now? His seat is not up until 2024. And he has not declared whether he will seek another term.
- Does your PAC support Sen. Manchin’s position to not amend or eliminate the filibuster? If not, why not?
- Your PAC is one of the largest property/casualty corporate trade associations in America, according to the PAC website. How many property/casualty corporate clients exist in West Virginia? It is a small state, so why finance a potential Manchin reelection effort?
Manchin, the last-standing state-wide Democrat in formerly blue West Virginia, smells the breath of Donald John Trump and his supporters. Trump won the mostly White state overwhelmingly in 2020. In the 1990s, an Eastern Panhandle nightclub settled a civil rights lawsuit with the U.S. Department of Justice. The DOJ contended Black people were not permitted to enter the place.
Here is something interesting from Open Secrets regarding Manchin donations from 2015 to 2020. He is not exactly a man of the people when it comes to money. But then he never claimed to be Bernie Sanders.
Large Individual Contributions $5,641,533 58.50%
PAC Contributions* $2,994,729 31.06%
Other $618,388 6.41%
Small Individual Contributions (< $200) $388,131 4.02%
Candidate self-financing $0 0.00%
David Anderson says
Manchin reminds me of a horrible dinosaur of old: Joe Lieberman (“D”-CT) who pretended to be a Democrat but was either a Trojan Horse, horribly confused when ticking which party he joined…. or… possibly just an a-hole and a huge liar.
D.A.
Steve Schneider says
I’m no fan of Lieberman or Manchin. But I have a more complicated view of things, I guess.
I get it that politics is at least sometimes about compromise and negotiation. My problem has been that the liberal side of the political alleyway always seems to be doing the giving. And when it comes to voting rights, I’m less inclined to give too much because I believe the warnings that our democracy is under attack by partisan Republicans in state legislatures across the nation.
Compromise on democracy, Sen. Manchin? I think not. Still, I was glad that he finally stopped hiding behind a vague call for “bipartisanship.” It is a step forward that Manchin spelled out what he supports and opposes. Now Democrats can begin to negotiate with fellow Democrats. Moscow Mitch has made it clear that national Republicans will not participate in the Democracy Revival legislation under consideration in Congress.
Do I agree with Manchin on keeping voter id? No. But I like his compromise solution, which Stacey Abrams has endorsed. Let’s expand our definition of voter id, Manchin suggests, to include electricity bills.
I also don’t like his call to let the states continue to “maintain voter lists.” Critics call this voter purges. I think the term voter purges fits because many states don’t just remove dead people or people who have moved, from the voter rolls. They also make mistakes and remove people who are legitimate voters. The 2000 presidential election in Florida is a classic example of this.
The Jeb Bush administration hired a private firm to compile a list of “felons” who did not qualify to vote under Florida law. So far, so good. But the list was corrupted — on purpose — some charge. The firm that put together the list didn’t just put Steve Schneider, a convicted felon, on the list. The private company also targeted Stevie Schneider, Stephen Schneider, and folk who lived near these poor souls. In other words, lots of legitimately registered voters were scrubbed from the voter rolls. A lawsuit after George W. Bush won Florida, and thus the presidency, revealed what happened but provided no remedy for the corrupted Florida win for the Bush brothers.
Should Democrats accept unrestricted voter purges? No. Should Democrats consider learning from Republicans? Maybe. For example, GOP state legislatures, under the guise of voter integrity, have written new laws that sometimes mandate fines or even jail time when election workers take certain actions. Would a proposed law garner bipartisan support if it said go ahead and “maintain voter rolls” but face fines and/or jail time if you remove the names of legitimate voters?
I doubt it. But why not test Manchin and Republicans on this issue?
Of course, Manchin has finally told us that he wants to see Election Day become a national holiday. The West Virginia conservative also wants voters to get 15 days of early voting, among other ideas that the Democratic majority in the Senate has backed.
So, Dave, I get what you are saying about Manchin. I will have a much better understanding of him when I learn whether an acceptable version of the For the People Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act are approved by Congress and signed by President Biden.
Adrian Tawfik says
Very interesting comments. I like your proposals Steve.
Steve Schneider says
Cool. As background, two people whose views I value seem ready to support the Manchin proposals. I just can’t tell if either Stacey Abrams and Professor Rick Hasen are open to attempts at amending at least some of what Manchin offers. Here are links on Abrams and Hasen, who publishes the valuable Election Law Blog.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/stacey-abrams-says-she-supports-manchins-voting-rights-compromise/ar-AAL9mGr?ocid=uxbndlbing
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/06/democrats-should-take-joe-manchin-deal.html
Also, here is a thoughtful piece by another law professor who wants to protect voting rights. The article is linked at Hasen’s Election Law Blog:
“Opinion: Manchin’s voting rights compromise is great — except it doesn’t take on ‘election subversion’”
Posted on June 19, 2021 7:06 am by Rick Hasen
Ned Foley WaPo column.
But other pieces of S. 1 that don’t make Manchin’s list deserve to be added. S. 1 has a section that would require voter-verified paper ballots, meaning voters have the opportunity to review an official paper record of their votes no matter what computer technology is employed to cast ballots. That’s an important way to protect the accuracy of ballot-counting, which is increasingly under threat. Another useful section of S. 1 provides grants to states to conduct risk-limiting audits, a recently developed statistical technique for checking the integrity of vote tallies.
The one overarching deficiency in Manchin’s laudable proposal is its lack of attention to the escalating risk of “election subversion,” the term that election-law expert Richard L. Hasen and others use to describe how Trump-inspired Republicans in battleground states are positioning themselves to undermine vote-counting.
The “audit” of the 2020 presidential election results in Arizona by the state GOP — Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) notably called it “an effort to subvert democracy” — could become a model for Trump’s acolytes elsewhere to perpetuate his claim that he was robbed of the election. It’s essential that Congress prevent the methods being used in Arizona, involving one party taking possession of ballots in violation of generally accepted chain-of-custody requirements, becoming the means by which state officials try to repudiate results they don’t like in 2022 and 2024.Congress could guard against this danger by requiring states to satisfy basic chain-of-custody standards. Each house of Congress ultimately has the power under the Constitution to verify vote tallies in elections to that chamber. Therefore, as long as Congress can keep the integrity of ballots intact while they remain in the hands of state officials, Congress can assure an accurate count of those ballots — assuming that Congress itself will count votes honestly.
There is no such chain-of-custody provision on Manchin’s list. But it isn’t in S. 1 either.
Congress can defer this issue to a later bill, but lawmakers won’t be finished safeguarding democracy before the midterms until Manchin can broker a deal on protections for counting, not just casting, votes.
The more Republicans who join Manchin, the better. But the obligation of bipartisanship in electoral reform extends only to the “loyal opposition” — not to an opposition hostile to democracy itself.