Manchin: I Have No Intention of Switching Parties “Right Now,” Don’t Know About the Future

Senator Joe Manchin would not say Monday whether he would follow his colleague Kyrsten Sinema and switch his party affiliation to independent from Democrat—but he didn’t shut the door on the option, either.

Sinema made waves Friday when she announced she was changing to independent, putting the Democrats’ hard-won Senate majority at risk.

“I’ll look at all of these things. I’ve always looked at all those things, but I have no intention of doing anything right now. Whether I do something later, I can’t tell you what the future is going to bring,” Manchin told CNN reporter Manu Raju.

“I’m not a Washington Democrat.… We’ll have to look. People are registering more for independent than any other party affiliation,” Manchin added.

If Manchin does switch parties like Sinema, their move would sharply curtail the Democrats’ power in Congress and would once more give the two centrist senators outsize influence over legislation.

Senate Democrats were elated when Raphael Warnock won the Georgia runoff election, giving them a 51–49 majority. This meant that they would control committees and could more easily approve judicial appointments. They could block dangerous legislation or investigations from the Republican-controlled House.

Crucially, it meant that if a senator stonewalled, major legislation would no longer automatically tank. Manchin and Sinema have spent the past two years stalling bills, including President Joe Biden’s signature Build Back Better plan.

Sinema’s change to independent has thrown the Democrats’ assured control up in the air once more. If Manchin follows suit, the two of them will become the deciding factors on every decision.

Senator Bernie Sanders, previously the only registered independent in the Senate, told CNN Sunday that Sinema’s decision likely had to do with her “political aspirations”—although she said the move had to do with her values.

When asked by Dana Bash if he thought Sinema had the “guts” to take on powerful special interest lobbies, Sanders replied: “No, she doesn’t.”

“She is a corporate Democrat who has, in fact, along with Senator Manchin sabotaged enormously important legislation,” he said.

After intervening on behalf of the former president who gave her her job, federal Judge Aileen Cannon has now admitted she never should have done so in the first place.

On Monday morning, Cannon dismissed a months-long order she enacted that hindered the investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged smuggling of classified government documents to his Mar-a-Lago resort home. This after Trump had specifically appealed to her in order to derail the investigation in the first place.

“The case is dismissed for lack of jurisdiction,” Cannon wrote in a short, defeated order.

Cannon’s order initially mandated the use of a special master to review classified, stolen documents seized by the Justice Department from Mar-a-Lago in August.

The order also barred investigators from “[using] the seized materials for investigative purposes.” In other words, she personally stopped federal investigators from investigating someone who had stolen a stash of national secrets.

On December 1, however, a three-judge panel from the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals rebuked Cannon’s order. “It is indeed extraordinary for a warrant to be executed at the home of a former president … [but to] create a special exception here would defy our Nation’s foundational principle that our law applies ‘to all, without regard to numbers, wealth, or rank,’” the panel wrote in its ruling.

The panel consisted of three Republican appointees—two being Trump’s own.

Trump’s failure to maintain Cannon’s stalling of the investigation follows an earlier attempt to ask the Supreme Court to intervene in the probe and appoint a special master specifically to review classified papers. The judges rejected Trump’s plea in a short, unsigned order, with no noted dissents.

Now, with Cannon’s dismissal, the Justice Department is cleared to continue its investigation into the stolen documents with no further delay.

Meanwhile, that a federal judge was able to intervene so summarily in the federal investigation of the man who appointed her perhaps warrants its own serious legal inquiry.

RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel refused Monday to say whether Donald Trump was to blame for the Republican Party’s flop during the midterm elections.

After the promised “red wave” failed to materialize in November, Republicans have been split on why that might be—despite the majority of MAGA candidates losing across the country. When asked on Fox Business whether Trump was at fault, McDaniel refused to lay the blame on him.

“I don’t like this, I don’t like these parceling out” of responsibility, she said. McDaniel said she felt there needed to be more analysis of what went wrong, particularly “the amount of ticket-splitting.”

“Why are Republicans going and voting for one Republican and not the other?” she asked.

When host Stuart Varney repeatedly insisted it was Trump, and whether that candidate campaigned on his message, McDaniel pushed back.

“I’m not into the blame game right now. I think we’ve got to do an analysis,” she said. “I think you can’t parcel out, ‘Well, this endorsement helped this one’...It’s the whole message. It’s, ‘What did each candidate do?’”

Except the biggest thing each candidate did was embrace Trump. Across the board, dozens of candidates who denied the 2020 election, spouted MAGA theories, and campaigned with Trump lost their race.

The list includes Kari Lake and Blake Masters in Arizona, Herschel Walker in Georgia, and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania. More than 35 Trump-endorsed gubernatorial, House, and Senate candidates lost the election.

The Washington Post reported Monday that Lake had been strongly advised to distance herself from Trump but refused. She became so focused on mimicking Trump that she failed to address actual issues that Arizonans were concerned about.

The RNC has launched a council to advise the Republican Party on how to perform better in future elections. One council member is Masters, who is definitely the person to consult on winning races.

Trump himself said that he should only be considered responsible if the candidates he endorsed won during the midterms. But as loss after loss rolled in, it became clear that voters and the party were tiring of him.

One of his former employees went so far as to call him a “loser.”

“Dave, what should I say?”

This is how Elon Musk waded into live comedy at Dave Chappelle’s show in San Francisco Sunday night, after forcing his material upon every Twitter user for weeks. Musk—so used to encouraging cry-laughing emojis from his adoring fans online—learned that Twitter is sometimes not real life.

Musk’s performance was doomed from the beginning, given how Chappelle introduced him. “Ladies and gentlemen, make some noise for the richest man in the world,” Chappelle said, almost inviting boos from the 18,000-seater stadium.

Musk paced back-and-forth across the stage while Chappelle attempted to redeem the moment.

“It sounds like some of the people you fired are in the audience,” he quipped. He could have left it at that. But alas.

“All those people who are booing, and I’m just pointing out the obvious, you have terrible seats,” Chappelle said, falling on the sword for Musk by calling everyone booing poor.

Chappelle seemed to argue Musk is above the rest of us, so the booing wouldn’t even faze him. “[He’s] not even trying to die on Earth. His whole business model is fuck Earth, I’m leaving anyway,” Chappelle said, instead tacitly admitting Musk’s basic disregard for the planet we live on.

When Musk asked Chappelle what he should say, Chappelle seemed aware things were beyond rescuing. “Don’t say nothing. It’ll only spoil the moment,” he said. “Do you hear that sound, Elon? That’s the sound of pending civil unrest.”

Years ago, Musk attempted to start a comedy “media empire” called Thud, which ironically is exactly the sound it made after it failed just over a year later.

That hasn’t stopped Musk from trying. “Comedy is now legal on Twitter,” he proudly proclaimed after he purchased the company. While his adoring fans will respond with glee to any of Musk’s “jokes,” we are already being assured that Sunday night’s boos are not making Musk mad at all.

The White House came out swinging Monday against Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s comments that had she organized the January 6 insurrection, it would have been successful.

The Georgia MAGA Republican spoke Saturday night at the New York Young Republican Club gala, where she joked about accusations that she helped organize the January 6 riot along with far-right figure Steve Bannon.

“I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed,” she said to applause.

The White House slammed her remarks Monday, telling CBS it “goes against our fundamental values as a country for a Member of Congress to wish that the carnage of January 6th had been even worse, and to boast that she would have succeeded in an armed insurrection against the United States government.”

“This violent rhetoric is a slap in the face to the Capitol Police, the DC Metropolitan Police, the National Guard, and the families who lost loved ones as a result of the attack on the Capitol. All leaders have a responsibility to condemn these dangerous, abhorrent remarks and stand up for our Constitution and the rule of law,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement.

Republican leadership has yet to speak out about her comments, including House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy. Greene has sought to establish herself as a McCarthy ally in recent months, urging the GOP to unite behind his bid to become House speaker in January.

McCarthy has shown he is very much still under the sway of Donald Trump, dragging his feet when it comes to condemning the former president’s recent outrageous behavior such as meeting with Holocaust deniers and demanding to terminate the Constitution.

Trump—and by extension, Greene—still holds a lot of influence in Congress, and McCarthy will need both their support to achieve his goals once the Republican-majority House is sworn in.

Rail workers might yet prevail in finally attaining paid sick days.

On Friday, 72 members of Congress, led by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representatives Jamaal Bowman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib, published a letter demanding President Biden “to do everything within your authority to guarantee rail workers the seven sick days that they desperately need through executive action.”

The letter lays out three pathways for Biden to achieve this.

Biden could expand upon President Obama’s 2015 order that established paid sick leave for all federal contractors. Obama’s order did not cover rail workers after the industry lobbied heavily for their exclusion. Biden can remedy this, following through where his predecessor fell short.

Secondly, the authors point out the labor secretary’s ability, under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, to establish mandatory safety and health standards for businesses involved in interstate commerce. “We can think of few industries more quintessential to interstate commerce than freight rail,” the letter notes.

Finally, the transportation secretary “has a duty to promote safety in all areas of railroad operations,” the authors explain. “Guaranteeing that workers are not operating trains or inspecting rail signals while sick or tired would fundamentally improve the safety of our national rail operations.”

With the exception of Sanders, an independent, all the other signatories to the letter were Democrats.

For weeks, Biden has appeared feeble in the face of railway company interests—and criticism from Republicans cosplaying as pro-worker advocates—as he helped impose a contract onto workers.

The authors write that giving 115,000 workers seven days of paid sick leave would cost less than two percent of the industry’s annual profits. “If the rail industry can afford to spend $25.5 billion in stock buybacks and dividends to enrich their wealthy shareholders, they can afford to treat their workers with the respect and the dignity that they deserve.”

Besides how little the basic policy would cost, the fact is that a dignified, respected worker should never have to risk their—or others’—health to go to work. The coming days will show whether Biden agrees with that basic idea.

Progressives made clear Friday they are not happy with Kyrsten Sinema and her decision to switch party affiliation.

Several of her colleagues issued scathing rebukes of the Arizona senator and her legislative history.

“With Senator Warnock’s re-election, Kyrsten Sinema’s ability to be the center of the political universe has ended within the Democratic Party,” said Representative Raul Grijalva, a fellow Arizonan and former head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, referring to Raphael Warnock’s victory in the Georgia runoff election.

“This is a predictable outcome for Senator Sinema as she has entirely separated herself from any semblance of representing hardworking and struggling Arizonans.”

Since coming to Capitol Hill, Sinema has undergone an ideological 180, seemingly jettisoning the progressive beliefs she previously espoused. This was one of progressives’ top critiques of her Friday.

She is also deeply unpopular across the board, but particularly among Democratic and independent voters.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, never one to hold back, also laid into Sinema, taking to Twitter to critique the senator’s video message announcing she was registering as an independent.

“Not once in this long soliloquy does Sinema offer a single concrete value or policy she believes in. She lays out no goals for Arizonans, no vision, no commitments,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “People deserve more.”

Representative Jamaal Bowman, another New York progressive, took a slightly different approach.

He posted a video of Sinema’s notorious flippant thumbs-down vote against raising the minimum wage, with a clip of himself giving a thumbs down superimposed on top.

“Bye Felicia!” he captioned the video.

After Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema announced her departure from the Democratic Party to become an independent, Arizona Representative Ruben Gallego pounced to criticize her.

“Last month, the voters of Arizona made their voices heard loud and clear — they want leaders who put the people of Arizona first. We need Senators who will put Arizonans ahead of big drug companies and Wall Street bankers,” Gallego said in a statement Friday. “Unfortunately, Senator Sinema is once again putting her own interests ahead of getting things done for Arizonans.”

Shortly after, the Gallego campaign team sent out a fundraising text message. “What if you knew that Ruben was strongly considering running for Senate but needed to know he’d have the grassroots support to run?” the text read.

This comes after Gallego blasted Sinema last month for being “nowhere to be found” leading up to the midterm elections.

“You did not see [Sinema] at one public event for anybody,” Gallego said on MSNBC. “And when we have these races that are really in the mix right now, she could have been a very good surrogate to help out a lot of our candidates. And she did nothing, because she only cares about herself.”

The Arizona representative’s targeting of Sinema—and hinting at running for her seat—is nothing new. Last July, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Gallego tweeted at Sinema, asking her to have a town hall and explain her opposition to forgoing the filibuster in order to codify the right to abortion. Later that month, Gallego’s campaign fundraised on Facebook, teasing a potential challenge against Sinema using similar language to Friday’s messaging.

At this point, it seems not a matter of if, but when Gallego announces his run for Sinema’s seat. Though Sinema is massively unpopular amongst pretty much all Arizonans, the growing enthusiasm for Gallego’s run will have to confront the very real possibility Sinema chooses to run as an independent.

On Friday morning, Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema bravely announced she is now a registered independent, rejecting the “partisan process” in favor of “solving problems and getting things done.”

Already, pundits are arguing that this is a situation where “progressives chase a moderate out of the party.” In the coming days, there will be even more arguments about how the Democratic Party is so radical it pushed out a key senator.

But this notion infantilizes one of the most powerful people in America and downplays Sinema’s own track record.

In reality, Sinema has a long history of obstructing the Democratic agenda. And whenever Sinema has blocked legislation, she has typically served the interests of the few.

Yes, there’s her stubborn support for the filibuster in lieu of pushing forward democratic reform. But there’s also the time Sinema stopped Congress from eliminating a tax loophole that served rich financiers. Or her opposition to raising taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations, reining in drug prescription prices, and spending even a fraction of what’s necessary to support the climate—ultimately sinking the Build Back Better agenda. And lest we forget Sinema’s infamous let-them-eat-cake thumbs down to giving working people a $15 minimum wage.

All this while Sinema has enjoyed massive hauls of cash from the pharma industry, payday lenders, and the financial sector. Doesn’t sound so “independent,” does it?

Progressive did not direct any “ire” at Sinema for no reason. Her own actions prompted it. When “solving problems” and “getting things done” is just in favor of the few, it’s only natural that she’ll alienate voters from her own party.

Let’s not conflate “free thinking” with an unaccountable one.

Senator Kyrsten Sinema may have thought that switching political affiliation Friday would help her get reelected, but in fact, she is deeply unpopular in Arizona across party lines—which is unlikely to change anytime soon.

FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver tweeted a graphic from an AARP poll conducted in September showing low support for Sinema among Arizona voters.

Only 37 percent of all likely voters viewed her favorably. Among Democrats, 57 percent viewed her unfavorably. Even among independents, her new team, 51 percent said they viewed her unfavorably.

In a reply to someone else’s comment, Silver estimated that Sinema would have had a 40 percent chance of winning her primary as a Democrat, and then about a 60 percent chance of winning the general election.

But now that she’s an independent, he put her chances of winning at only 25 percent.

Another poll, conducted in July by Data for Progress and the local Arizona news outlet The Copper Courier, found that Sinema had only a 42 percent approval rating among state residents. Only 34 percent of Arizona Democrats viewed her favorably.

Sinema’s abysmal approval levels should come as no surprise. Since being elected to Congress, she seems to have undergone a massive ideological transformation.

A former Green Party activist, Sinema had protested the Iraq War with the left-wing social justice group Code Pink and warned against the dangers of capitalism. But once she reached Capitol Hill, she swung much more moderate.

Most notably, she voted with a flippant thumbs-down against increasing the minimum wage—despite previously being vocal in support of raising it.

The Arizona state Democratic Party had censured Sinema in January for opposing the removal of the filibuster. The group similarly did not hold back in response to Sinema’s party change, charging that she had failed to stand up for her constituents in key areas such as voting rights and holding major corporations accountable.

“Senator Sinema may now be registered as an Independent, but she has shown she answers to corporations and billionaires, not Arizonans,” the party said in a statement. “Senator Sinema’s party registration means nothing if she continues to not listen to her constituents.”