Hints and Shadows

Yesterday Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) announced his support for abolishing or dramatically reforming the Senate filibuster. This comes after comments earlier this week from Joe Manchin in which he said he won’t budge from the Senate’s current 60 vote threshold for advancing legislation. That comes less than two weeks after Manchin expressed support for moving toward a so-called ‘talking filibuster’ and only a few more weeks after Manchin insisted he would support the filibuster no matter what and forever. Put this all together and at least on the surface you have a confusing mix of signals – often entirely contradictory – that makes it very hard to make sense of what is happening with the filibuster and thus whether there is any real chance of more legislation this year while Democrats have the slenderest hold on both the executive and the legislative branches of government.