Meet the most powerful woman in Washington not named Pelosi or Harris

President Biden is attempting to transform the country in the first year of his presidency more than any of the previous 13 presidents, going all the way back to FDR. And with a Democratic-controlled House and essentially a Democratic-controlled Senate, who’s to stop him? 

Enter Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), who are both publicly rebuking their fellow Democrats, particularly regarding their support for abolishing the filibuster, to the point that Biden is openly calling them out for it.  

“I hear all the folks on TV saying, ‘Why doesn’t Biden get this done?’” Biden said in a speech this week in regards to the difficulty he’s having enacting his agenda. “Well, because Biden only has a majority of effectively four votes in the House, and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.”

Of course, this is not true. According to FiveThirtyEight.com, Manchin and Sinema have voted with Biden’s position 100 percent of the time. For context, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have each voted with Biden’s position 97 percent of the time. Consequently, the Washington Post awarded Biden Three Pinocchios for the false statement.

Manchin and Sinema have been in complete lockstep with the president to this point, but the rubber now meets the road as it pertains to the filibuster, which Biden passionately defended as a senator but now seemingly wants to blow up. 

Democratic activists in the media are demanding that the filibuster be abolished, and warning that not getting rid of it will result in everything from racism at the polls to a wipeout in the 2022 midterms. 

“When it comes to the filibuster, immigration is a big issue, of course, related to the filibuster, but there’s also Republicans who are passing bill after bill trying to restrict voting rights,” PBS White House Correspondent Yamiche Alcindor, who sometimes plays an objective journalist on TV, said to the president during a March press conference. “Why not back a filibuster rule that at least gets around issues, including voting rights or immigration? [South Carolina Congressman] Jim Clyburn, someone, of course, who you know very well, has backed the idea of a filibuster rule when it comes to civil rights and voting rights?”

“In a Senate without a filibuster, Democrats have some chance of passing some rough facsimile of the agenda they’ve promised,” the New York Times’s Ezra Klein stated in an op-ed. “In a Senate with a filibuster, they do not.”

“They have preferred the false peace of decorum to the true progress of democracy. If they choose that path again, they will lose their majority in 2022, and they will deserve it,” Klein adds. 

Yep. Nothing screams democracy quite like one party ramming through legislation while blowing up the filibuster, which Biden once passionately defended.

“It is not only a bad idea, it upsets the constitutional design and it disservices the country,” Biden said in a 2005 speech. “No longer would the Senate be that ‘different kind of legislative body’ that the Founders intended. No longer would the Senate be the ‘saucer’ to cool the passions of the immediate majority.”

Manchin and Sinema, channeling Biden circa 2005, have stated that they will not back abolishing the filibuster. But of course none of Biden’s big-ticket items – including his $2 trillion “infrastructure” bill, a push among Democrats to permanently change how we vote and the enactment of police “reform” that makes departments weaker as crime skyrockets – can happen without ending the filibuster. 

Sinema explained her opposition in a statement last week that set off a firestorm on liberal Twitter.

“The filibuster was not created to accomplish one thing or another,” she said. “It was created to bring together members of different parties to find compromise and coalition.”

In response, MSNBC’s Joy Reid accused Sinema and Manchin of opposing democracy itself. ABC’s Joy Behar also used the “destroy democracy” angle, which isn’t hyperbolic or anything.

She and Manchin are holding our democracy hostage. https://t.co/9jevMSXa7s

— Joy Behar (@JoyVBehar) June 5, 2021

And at a recent press conference held by Sinema, a reporter posed her “question” this way.

“Some people are saying that you have a choice between the filibuster and democracy. Your answer to that?”

Sen. Sinema on Tuesday in AZ:

Q: “Some people are saying that you have a choice between the filibuster and democracy. Your answer..?”

SINEMA: “As folks in Arizona know, I’ve long been a supporter of the filibuster because it is a tool that protects the democracy of our nation.”

— Ryan Struyk (@ryanstruyk) June 3, 2021

Is that really a question?

Then there’s former Obama senior adviser David Plouffe, who told Brian Williams on MSNBC recently, “The most important issue now facing the country, and the politicians in Washington is saving this democracy. And Senator Sinema, I’m glad she won her race in 2018, but she said today the filibuster is there to preserve democracy. But if we’re left with a choice between saving the filibuster and ending democracy, let’s just turn the lights out now, because that’s where we’re headed.”

Progressive Democrats and their media allies want the filibuster gone in the name of protecting democracy, or something. Their obsession with ditching the filibuster therefore makes Krysten Sinema more powerful than the speaker of the House or the vice president.

Because without the support of Sinema (along with Manchin), Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will likely be retired after the 2022 midterms when control of the House returns to the GOP, and Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote in the Senate will no longer be needed.

Joe Concha is a media and politics columnist for The Hill.