As Republicans prepare to take control of both chambers of Congress and the presidency, Senator Joe Manchin, the conservative West Virginia Democrat turned independent, has a question for his former Democratic teammates: “How do you like that filibuster now?”
Mr. Manchin is feeling sassy these days. His ex-party just got its clock cleaned and is facing two years, minimum, in the political wilderness. And, no surprise, as Mr. Manchin prepares to retire in January, he has plenty of thoughts on preserving the Senate’s role as an independent power center — a mission that feels especially vital with Donald Trump’s return to Washington.
Love him or loath him, Mr. Manchin is worth a listen as a man who understands how to use power whether you’re in the minority or the majority in the Senate. And at age 77, with more than four decades in politics, he takes the long view — a healthy mind-set for discouraged Democrats.
“They’ve got to understand that what goes around will come around, and what comes around will go around,” he said in a recent interview, lamenting the left’s attempts to blow up the filibuster, as well as its use of other procedural tricks to push through bills along partisan lines.
With Republicans ascendant, Mr. Manchin is now imploring them to resist the inevitable pressure to bend congressional rules and norms. And he thinks that in the Trump era, his favorite hobbyhorse, the unhip concept of bipartisanship, could and should get some new love on Capitol Hill. Mr. Manchin noted that Mr. Trump “won the popular vote and the Electoral College vote, which is great for the president,” who has claimed a mandate. “The Senate and the House do not have a mandate,” Mr. Manchin continued, noting how closely divided the chambers are. “They have a working mandate, if you want to say it that way. That means they must work with the other side.”
Some of Mr. Trump’s sketchier cabinet choices seem designed as an early test of his legislative partners’ obeisance. But Mr. Manchin expressed confidence that neither the Senate’s Democrats nor its Republicans (he counts the next majority leader, John Thune, as a “dear friend”) will just roll over for the new president’s picks. “You don’t let your vote go lightly,” he said, adding that tenet has been “pretty sacred” in his time in the Senate.
The quick implosion of Matt Gaetz’s selection to be attorney general was telling to Mr. Manchin. And listening to him lay out his own questions and concerns, I did wonder if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or, even more likely, Tulsi Gabbard, could be in real trouble. Speaking generally about Mr. Trump’s picks, he said, “When they start coming up here thinking that senators would just fall in line because Donald Trump coming in has such a strong grip on things — this is still three independent branches of government.”
Reflecting on the Gaetz debacle, he said, “Even President Trump, his first four years I think gave him a little better understanding that there’s certain things you can bluster through it and you can basically do a lot of the things you want, but, when push comes to shove, there’s still a process.”
The best way to operate in the majority, as Mr. Manchin sees it, is to return to “regular order,” a less top-down, more committee-focused approach to moving legislation that encourages consensus building. This would be a notable departure from the Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell models of late. “If they could get back to where there’s more participation, you won’t have all this pent-up animosity so that whenever you get one piece of legislation, everybody tries to throw everything on it,” argued Mr. Manchin. Sure, you could end up with less efficiency and more chaos, but with public trust in Congress in the toilet, a more open, collaborative process might be worth a shot.
Besides, shoving a bill down one party’s throat just because you can is no way to operate, he added, saying, “It’ll come back to bite you and hurt you.” Then you wind up “flip-flopping back and forth every two years” when the opposing party takes over and works to reverse your achievements. Recent history suggests he is not wrong: When Mr. Trump had a unified government the last time, during his first two years in office, there was overreach by Republicans, and they lost the House in 2018.
“And guess what,” Mr. Manchin added, “the Democrats just followed suit and did an overreach and did exactly the same thing, and they lost it in the ’22 election.”
But will a Republican-led Senate in a Trump-dominated capital really carry out its role as a moderating force for deliberation and temperance, for checks and balances? Is that even possible? As glorious as this sounds, it also feels more than a smidgen naïve in this age of polarization and political blood sport. Mr. Trump expects Republicans in the House and Senate to fulfill his wishes no matter the cost. And watching them deal with the messes he is already dropping on their plates brought to mind a conversation I had with another Washington player, an ambitious House Republican, during the first Trump transition. It’s a chat that now reads like a cautionary tale.
In December 2016, Mark Meadows, then a representative from North Carolina, was gearing up for his new gig as the head of the House Freedom Caucus. He and his fellow far-right partisans had enjoyed a wild rumpus during the Obama years, banging away not only at the Democratic president but also at Republican congressional leaders seen as too prone to compromise and collaboration. Mr. Meadows rose to prominence as the man who effectively drove out John Boehner, the Republican House speaker, the year before.
So, with Republicans prepping for unified control of the government, I called Mr. Meadows to ask how he saw his group’s mission, and how he anticipated dealing with a heavy-handed president from his own party. Whether we were talking policy or a broader concern such as “executive overreach” — one of the Freedom Caucusers’ favorite charges against Barack Obama — things could get pretty sticky pretty quickly with Mr. Trump, I noted.
“Certainly it’s easier to fight the president when it’s someone from the opposing party,” Mr. Meadows allowed at the time. But to be taken seriously, the caucus couldn’t change its values based on which party occupied the Oval Office. That would be “hypocritical,” he said. “To stay true to conservative principles, we’ve got to fight for that whether it’s President Obama in the White House or President Trump.”
We all know how that high-mindedness played out with the Freedom Caucus, and most vividly for Mr. Meadows.
It’s not simply that he rolled over and became a Trumpian lap dog, like so many congressional conservatives. In March 2020, he left the House to become the White House chief of staff. And following Mr. Trump’s re-election defeat that November, Mr. Meadows threw himself with Rudy Giuliani-esque gusto into Trumpworld’s scheme to overturn the results. He wound up being held in criminal contempt of Congress, and later, criminally indicted in not one but two states. Whatever the ultimate disposition of his legal troubles, Mr. Meadows’s reputation has been shredded and set on fire, personally and professionally.
What’s the lesson, beyond not trying to help steal an election?
As Mr. Meadows acknowledged, leading the charge against a president from the opposing party is easy. Figuring out how to support a president from your own party yet also hold him accountable — all while not abandoning your core principles — can be wicked hard. With someone like Mr. Trump, who is all about pushing boundaries, avoiding accountability and bending every aspect of the government to his will, the work is that much harder.
Heading into the first Trump term, Mr. Meadows may well have been lying about his vision for the Freedom Caucus, to me or at least to himself. But Republicans back then weren’t prepared for the high price of putting their fealty to Mr. Trump above all else.
That picture is far clearer now, for them and for the rest of us. For the next couple of years, our system of checks and balances will rest heavily on Republican lawmakers’ ability to walk a tricky line between loyalty and independence. It will at times be excruciating. Mr. Trump will see to that. But, like Mr. Manchin, we should all be rooting for them to succeed.
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