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Joe Manchin Just Killed the Voting Rights Bill.

Under the watch of the Democratic party, democracy will continue to unravel.

Lauren Elizabeth
3 min readJun 6, 2021
Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

Well, it’s official.

West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin has effectively killed landmark, essential federal voting rights legislation, writing about his decision to vote against the For the People Act in a local West Virginia paper. For good measure, he also reaffirmed that he will not vote to reform or nuke the filibuster. As if that wasn’t enough, piling on to this news is the fact that it comes at a time when 100 experts have signed a letter expressing their belief that American democracy itself is on the line if Democrats don’t act now.

Even before Democrats took unilateral control, I and many others argued on a number of occasions about how fundamentally unequipped and unwilling they were to meet the urgency of this moment. Clearly, they’re meeting those expectations. For literally as long as I have been able to read, writing has been my outlet of choice. It isn’t often when words evade me, but this is certainly one of those moments where I genuinely don’t even know where to begin.

Across social media, a number of people seemed to be echoing the same sentiments of frustration. Covie wrote on twitter:

“When democracy is dead at least…

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Lauren Elizabeth
Lauren Elizabeth

Written by Lauren Elizabeth

Lauren is a writer & leftist with analysis on topics related to politics & policy. She can be reached at LaurenMartinchek@gmail.com or Twitter @xlauren_mx

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