A vignette

by liberal japonicus

This post has been rattling around in my mind and the recent discussion has me try and put this up, though it is unfinished. First, a name that I knew, sort of a second order relationship (I know several people who knew him) popped up in this headline

What Joe Manchin told Steve Clemons at dinner

What I didn't realize was that Steve Clemons was "Editor At Large of The Hill, D.C. operator and Joe Manchin’s confidant.". I want to note a few things about him, but first, to summarize the article, it tells how Clemons (who is gay) ended up working with Manchin over the repeal of Don't ask, don't tell. Clemons was the one who suggested that Manchin go on with Rachel Maddow.

Fastforward to the more immediate present,

Ryan: I heard that last night [the night of January 12] you had an interesting dinner.

Steve: Yeah.

Ryan: So, who did you have dinner with last night, Steve?

Steve: The first dinner or the second dinner?

Ryan: Well, I don't know. Let's hear it.

Steve: No, I mean, like sorry, I gotta be careful, but I had dinner with Joe Manchin and with Randi Weingarten at Cafe Milano. And I think, Randi...

Ryan: This is on the eve of when Joe Biden is going up to the Senate to speak at the caucus lunch and basically try and pressure [Senators] Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to change their views on the filibuster and support voting rights. So this is on the eve... You're having dinner with Joe Manchin on the eve of one of the most important days of his Senate career.

Steve: I can talk about what I think the players are doing [unintelligible]. I'd rather not talk just about the conversation at the dinner.

Ryan: Well, I think it's been reported that Randi was trying. Randi helped him with the compromise voting rights legislation.

Steve: What Randi did, she said, look, you had a problem... So much of Washington, I just wanna be honest with people, is sometimes... It's not a function of corruption or special interests. It's sometimes just a function of lack of imagination, or people are driven by inertia. I kind of see a role that fits with my role as an opinion journalist. I'm not a reporting journalist, right? So that's a different, big difference, as somebody who has views and attitudes. But I try to be responsible and transparent about it in responsible ways. I also see my role as one of opening the aperture of different people who are in conflict or who are not there. Opening aperture so they can see possibilities they might not have otherwise thought they had. I look at that as a legitimate and actually a needed part of my role in Washington, right?
I think the point is that Joe Manchin, I knew, believed that S.R. 1 was too packed with things that were unrelated to the openness or the constraints on voting, and also that it was packed with issues that were more about social reform than they were about dealing with the voting questions. And he was dead, dead set against S.R. 1. What he was for was the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. But anyone that looked at the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which is commendable and important, knows it does not go far enough to address many of the problems in voting that we had seen recently, particularly with voter suppression and various kinds of things. I think that his take was we needed to modify this. I humbly suggested "Well what you're really doing is talking about John Lewis Plus." Randi suggested talking to Stacey Abrams, and he, in a Joe Manchin way — because he's tried to be very chivalrous, very magnanimous — [said] "Yeah, sure. Sure, we'll do that." But there was a long time before that call with Stacey actually happened. They had multiple calls, and then he and Stacey really worked on putting together a voting rights outline of things that laid out some things, like voter ID that were uncomfortable for the Democrats but were potential pathways for Republican support. But they kind of cobbled it, something, together. Barack Obama and other people came along and applauded it. Even Joe Biden says "I applaud it." So they came up with something.

Now, I have not followed the voting legislation closely, so perhaps some folks can weigh in with more details about Manchin and 'John Lewis Plus". But I want to talk about Clemons. His wikipedia page, is a bit short on details but as I understand it, he was a protege of Chalmers Johnson. The wikipedia page emphasizes his journey from a 'cold war warrior' to a critic of American imperialism, but "As a public intellectual, he first led the "Japan revisionists" who critiqued American neoliberal economics with Japan as a model, and their arguments faded from view as the Japanese economy stagnated in the mid-1990s and later." I suppose that is one way to look at it, but being in Japan, he was someone who raised a lot of trenchant criticisms about the Japanese system. Johnson was placed in a box called 'revisionists' after his publication of MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975. While it is really difficult to give a precis of the arguments, the reason I know Clemons name is in that regard.

As Japan became irrelevant, Clemons decamped to Washington, working at the Atlantic and is now Editor at Large for The Hill. My impression of The Hill is that in its click-baity approach to politics, it ends up in a right leaning space such that I never click on any link from them.

In looking for more background on Clemons, trying to understand why he would want to be 'Joe Manchin's confident', I came across this interview in the Washington Blade, a publication which says that it is "The oldest LGBTQ newspaper in the U.S. covering the latest gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender news in Washington, DC and around the world." The interview has this line

If your life were a book, what would the title be?
“America’s Gay Machiavelli”

There's a lot of ways to take that, and my take is going to wrapped up with the fact that I'm in Japan, wondering if I should have decamped. Or been more of a go-getter. I didn't have Clemons' goals of 'Improving the direction of U.S. foreign policy — getting Israel/Palestine resolved, ending the Afghanistan war, getting Iran on a non-nuclear course, normalizing relations with Cuba, etc." but if I have to be honest, part of my disgust with that line is possibly fueled by resentment. So, as it always is, it is more about me than him. Still, I wonder how a gay man who pats himself on the back about getting Manchin to move on DADT feels as 'Manchin's confidant' in the current political situation, especially after reading this in the first piece.

Ryan: This is on the eve of when Joe Biden is going up to the Senate to speak at the caucus lunch and basically try and pressure [Senators] Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to change their views on the filibuster and support voting rights. So this is on the eve... You're having dinner with Joe Manchin on the eve of one of the most important days of his Senate career.

Steve: I can talk about what I think the players are doing [unintelligible]. I'd rather not talk just about the conversation at the dinner.

This doesn't mean that I think every discussion should be on the record. But I imagine that there is a tricky balancing act and even if he wants to call out Manchin, he can't. Which to me explains a lot of our problems. At any rate, discuss.

Comments

[Donald]

Kinda hoping someone more knowledgeable on this than me ( not a high bar in this case) would comment. I have seen similar claims that there are voting bills that could pass.

I thought of jumping into the other thread where I could start wars on multiple fronts (or less flippantly, disagree with various people on certain issues) but I’m in more of a shut up and lurk mood.

[wj]

I have seen similar claims that there are voting bills that could pass.

My sense is that, at best, some arcane procedural magic might be able to at least get debate going in the Senate. At which point, those oppised would be forced to actually vote specific items up or down. That might, maybe, result in some few changes getting enacted.

But as long as the filibuster** can be used to prevent debate even starting, it doesn't matter how popular specific changes are -- and most of them are.

** That's the current, a-threat-is-enough, no-actual-talking-required filibuster. Pity those who are so devoted to the filibuster don't call for a return to the classic talkung filibuster.

[Nigel]

Fallows has a good article on the filibuster.
https://fallows.substack.com/p/four-facts-about-the-filibuster

[liberal japonicus]

I just received this from a friend of mine about a candidate for Senate from NC, Matthew Hoh
https://www.matthewhohforsenate.org/

here is a c-span interview with him about his resignation from the State Department
https://www.c-span.org/video/?458394-1/qa-matthew-hoh

I know we have some folks from NC here, so I post this here.

[cleek]

i wish him well. but i'm not sure how well a Counterpunch-style anti-war activist is going to do in a state like NC - #5 in per-capita military personnel.

[russell]

If your life were a book, what would the title be?

“America’s Gay Machiavelli”

I try to avoid people whose self-description includes the name "Machiavelli".

[Donald]

I didn’t realize this until Sirota pointed it out, but the filibuster was waived last month to pass the debt ceiling bill. That’s a good thing, but it also shows the ( gasp) hypocrisy of people who claim the filibuster should never ever be tampered with.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/us/politics/debt-ceiling-congress.html

(Of course the debt ceiling apocalypse threat is another extraordinarily stupid thing about America.)

I don’t get why this can’t be pointed out in the press discussions of the filibuster.

The Senate Parlimentarian is another useless appendage. Though maybe if the filibuster were eliminated she could go back to well- deserved obscurity.

[russell]

The argument for keeping and respecting the filibuster is that, if it is eliminated or worked around, the (R)'s will exploit that to ram through their own agenda when they regain the majority.

As far as I can tell, the (R)'s treat Senate rules as a form of Calvinball already. In the interest of fairness, I'll say that it's entirely possible that (D)'s do that as well.

The rules are whatever the body in question wants them to be, within the boundaries defined in the Constitution. The filibuster isn't mentioned in the Constitution, and in fact it interferes with the principle of simple majority rule that *is* assumed for all but a small handful of cases in the Constitution.

The filibuster as currently implemented in the Senate renders the Senate non-functional. One Senator can prevent a bill coming to the floor at all by simply "registering an objection".

Whatever benefit it may have ever had is more than outweighed by the way it is used currently to basically bring legislation to a halt.

Things are useful - they serve a constructive purpose - or they are not. If they are not, they should go.

At a minimum, we should return to the "percentage of Senators present and voting" standard. If a cohort within the Senate wants to block a bill from coming to the floor, at least make them work for it.

We already had a form of governance where a 2/3 majority was needed to pass any legislation. It was a failure, for that and other reasons, and we therefore got rid of it.

[Donald]

The last part of this article answered my own question—

https://www.salon.com/2022/01/15/how-the-states-have-become-laboratories-of-autocracy--and-why-its-worse-than-you-think/

Basically what I have read is that some Republicans are willing to pass a more moderate form of election protection.

Anyway, the article explains why these seemingly moderate compromises are actually just cynical, something you would expect of Mitch McConnell favors them.

[nous]

I try to avoid people whose self-description includes the name "Machiavelli".

Heh.

I would mind it less if it seemed that the person had read and understood Machiavelli to begin with, and not just be riffing on the Cliff Notes popular version that lives in the public imagination.

Maybe he just likes 2pac?

[liberal japonicus]

Interestingly, this popped up

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/multi-cultural-bebop-channel-awaits-finra-clearance-steve-clemons-in-as-ceo-301214274.html

which gets you to this site
https://www.beboptv.com/

and this
https://bebopgo.io/

Before the pandemic, I did some work with a group that did teacher conferences in places that didn't get many native speaking teachers. The idea was that we would use our own money or any research funds we got from our Japanese unis to go to these countries and make presentations. Sometimes, it is problematic, and some of the presenters don't really seem to understand their privilege, but the majority just want to help, provide support and make friends. However, there is always another class of people, they don't want to present or get involved in getting to know teachers, but they want to 'manage' things. It's a bit like disaster capitalism, so they can get the perks from helping out. I wonder what it would take him to tell Manchin that he needs to change. Obviously more than what has happened now.