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.