When Sen. Joe Manchin's office told CNN this week that he opposes the For the People Act, the West Virginia Democrat struck a fatal blow to his party's signature legislation to overhaul the elections, redistricting, campaign finance and ethics rules.
From its debut in 2019, the legislation was considered a long shot at best and likely nothing more than a messaging platform for Democrats. That prediction -- the first article written by The Fulcrum -- has come to fruition two and a half years later as the parties avoided attempts at compromise and fought over congressional rules that stymied passage.
In March 2019, Democrats forced the bill through the House on a strictly party-line vote while knowing Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was never going to allow a vote in the Republican-run Senate.
But after Joe Biden won the presidency and Democrats took control of a 50-50 Senate, the bill's backers thought they might have a real opportunity to enact the popular legislation (known to many as HR 1 and S 1). However, while the Democrats again won passage in the House (this time with one Democrat joining all Republicans in opposition), they still faced the daunting challenge of overcoming the Senate filibuster.
The chamber's rules allow senators to obstruct a vote by prolonging debate indefinitely. The only way to end the debate and move to a vote is to "invoke cloture," which requires 60 senators to vote in favor of ending debate and moving to a vote on the subject at hand. In recent years, cloture votes have become the norm for any partisan bill -- even without any senators actually engaging in a filibuster.
A number of Democrats have called for abolishing the legislative filibuster this year (the Senate previously ended the practice of filibustering presidential nominations) in order to pass the For the People Act. But two Democratic senators, Manchin and Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema, have said they oppose ending the Senate tradition. If both of them changed their minds, the filibuster could be abolished and only a bare majority would be needed to pass the For the People Act. (This last step could be achieved if all Democrats voted in favor and Vice President Harris broke the anticipated tie.)
With Manchin opposing the bill, there's no path forward.
So how did we get here?
First, the For the People Act has been a partisan play from the beginning. Democrats set it as a legislative priority and never invited Republicans to help craft or change the legislation. Of course, Republicans did not seek a meaningful role -- both sides dug into their deep-rooted positions with no room for compromise.
And then there's the filibuster, which for more than two centuries has been cited as a tool for preventing a majority from running roughshod over the political minority, helping the Senate cool any tempers flaring in the House of Representatives. In order to overcome opposition, senators were forced to reach a compromise accepted by both parties.
But opinions have shifted and some reformers have cited the filibuster as a leading cause of legislative dysfunction, saying one cranky lawmaker (or the minority as a whole) can gum up the works when a majority is trying to serve the people.
While the massive bill, which has demonstrated bipartisan support in polling, has nowhere to go, perhaps it could be scrapped for parts. Republicans might be willing to accept some components that prove popular among their constituents, as long as they can still say they are preventing a federal takeover of elections. But don't hold your breath.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.