Trump praises Manchin for keeping filibuster after telling Republicans to get rid of it for years

Now that Democrats hold slim majority, former president calls filibuster ‘very important’ despite calling on GOP to use ‘nuclear option’

Donald Trump praised Democratic Senator Joe Manchin for refusing calls to nuke the filibuster, as Democrats face a Republican blockade against Joe Biden’s agenda and legislation on voting rights, infrastructure, gun control and other critical issues.

“It’s a very important thing,” the former president told Fox Business Network on Monday. “He’s doing the right thing, and it’s a very important thing.”

Mr Trump urged GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans for years to destroy filibuster rules, stressing that if Republicans didn’t do it while holding the majority, Democrats would the next time they do. Current Senate rules require 60 votes to proceed with a final vote on most pieces of legislation.

“Republican Senate must get rid of 60 vote NOW!” he said on Twitter in July 2017. “It is killing the R Party, allows 8 Dems to control country. 200 Bills sit in Senate. A JOKE!”

“The very outdated filibuster must go,” he wrote.

In 2018, he told Senator McConnell to “use the nuclear option” and “get it done”.

“Our country is counting on you!” he said.

But now that Democrats hold a slim majority in Congress, the former president is celebrating a Democratic senator who opposes both reforming filibuster rules and the For The People Act, a sweeping voting rights and elections ethics bill that would serve as an antidote to a wave of GOP-backed state-level legislation that threatens to undermine the right to vote.

Mr Trump supports those Republican bills, which were filed in the wake of his re-election loss, spurious legal campaign to toss out millions of Americans’ votes, and a pro-Trump mob’s failed insurrection at the US Capitol that sought to overturn the results.

Senate Republicans embarked on their first successful filibuster of this Congress ahead of a vote on forming a bipartisan commission to investigate the events surrounding and during the riot on 6 January.

In a statement after the vote ahead of Congress’s absence from Washington DC for Memorial Day, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer – who intends to press forward the For The People Act – said Republicans’ moves point to the “limits of bipartisanship and the resurgence of Republican obstructionism”.

In an op-ed for the Charleston Gazette-Mail published on Sunday morning, Senator Manchin of West Virginia said that voting reforms in the For The People Act “all but ensure partisan divisions continue to deepen” across the country and suggested that White House-backed legislation to support voting rights at the federal level is as politically destructive as GOP-backed efforts in nearly every state to strip them away.

“Whether it is state laws that seek to needlessly restrict voting or politicians who ignore the need to secure our elections, partisan policymaking won’t instill confidence in our democracy – it will destroy it,” he wrote.

Mr Schumer said he intends to bring a vote on the For The People Act to the Senate floor by the end of June.