U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WV, speaking on a panel with former U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, R-OH, moderated by Andrew Lewis, a University of Cincinnati associate professor who heads up the Portman Center for Policy Solutions. (Photo by Nick Evans, Ohio Capital Journal.)

In Cincinnati Monday, outgoing West Virginia Democratic U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin and former Ohio Republican U.S. Sen. Rob Portman made the case for bipartisanship in an era of increasingly polarized politics.

A fellowship program named in Portman’s honor at the University of Cincinnati is training students interested in policy to pursue the kind of balanced dealmaking that was central to Portman’s legislative career. Talking after the event, he’s clearly thrilled to be working with students who may be part of the next generation of policymakers, and hopes his experience can help to mold their outlook.

“I meet with them regularly,” he explained, “and it’s just been great for, thinking about the future of our country, to be with some young people who are really bright and accomplished and committed to the mission.”

Manchin’s next move is a bit hazier. He announced he wouldn’t seek reelection to the U.S. Senate last year, and then briefly flirted with running for president as an independent or maybe as a Democrat. Manchin says he’s not leaving the public stage quite yet, and his chief concern is a perceived extremism on both sides of the aisle making it difficult to govern as a centrist.

“You will beat me if you can control the primary and the parties want total control,” Manchin said. “Both of them are guilty of this, and that’s what we’re fighting right now.”

What that looks like in practice appears to be advocacy for open primaries or even some kind of ranked choice voting system. Manchin name dropped a centrist political organization founded by his daughter called Americans Together. In addition to reforming primaries, the group advocates for independent redistricting commissions, conservative fiscal, immigration and energy policies as well as restoring Roe and a handful of popular firearm restrictions.

Electoral Count Reform Act

Portman and Manchin took a victory lap for the accomplishments of the 117th Congress. They argued bipartisanship was crucial to securing passage of legislation like the Infrastructure law and the CHIPS Act. But they placed special emphasis on the Electoral Count Reform Act passed in response to the January 6 riot.

“We took off and we said, we gotta do something quick. This can never happen again,” Manchin described. “January 6 was real — it was real — we were there.”

“It was a terrible day,” Portman agreed, “and what we did was try to figure out, how do you avoid this happening again because of the ambiguity of this legislation?”

The legislation in question was the 1887 Electoral Count Act. Although for more than a hundred years candidates had treated the counting of electoral votes in Congress as a ceremonial process, allies of former President Donald Trump believed there was enough ambiguity in its provisions that they could overturn the 2020 election.

How the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 would block attempts to overturn the 2024 Election

Among the changes made in 2022, the law makes explicit that the Vice President is serving in a “ministerial” capacity and has no power to throw out electoral votes. Manchin explained they also made it more difficult to challenge a state’s slate of electors. Under previous law, you needed just one member from the House and Senate to challenge a state’s electors.

“That throws everything into flux,” Manchin said. “So we said we’ve got to change that. So then we went back and forth, we put numbers on it, we finally have in the Electoral Count (Reform) Act, it takes 20%. That’s a little harder — now you have to have 20 senators, okay? That makes it a little bit more difficult.”

Portman described provisions granting access to presidential transition funding for both candidates in the event of a disputed election. Following the 2020 race, the political appointee heading up the Government Services Administration was put in the unenviable position of having to decide which candidate got funding — her boss or the actual winner.  In a letter making the determination, she described receiving threats that extended to her staff, family and even pets.

“So we changed that,” Portman explained, “and we said, if it is disputed, if it’s still in the courts and so on, then both transitions get some funding.”

Even with those changes, though, the Trump campaign is making some outside observers nervous. The transition funding comes with ethics rules, and Trump’s team has yet to reach an agreement to release funding and other federal assistance.

“We need to focus on our country,” Portman argued. “And whoever ends up winning, you want that person to have their transition underway, right? You want to have the country continue to run, not miss a beat.”

No easy task

But even their bipartisanship success story offers an example of how challenging it can be to build consensus. Manchin noted in the immediate aftermath of January 6, they had about 20 people interested in working on a legislative fix. But as they zeroed in on the eventual package that number was whittled down.

“We lose a person here, a person there,” he said, “We ended up, it was like 10 of us, maybe at the end, five and five, stayed right with it and got something done.”

In Manchin’s telling, the problem was lawmakers’ reach exceeding their grasp — attempting to tackle more than the chamber as a whole would be willing to accept. The idea of too much ambition being counterproductive also came up in his warning against modifying the filibuster.

The Senate’s de facto 60 vote threshold has tripped up numerous significant policy proposals in recent years, and Vice President Kamala Harris has endorsed the idea of eliminating the requirement for reproductive rights issues so that Congress could codify the legal standards laid out in Roe. It’s the reason Manchin has chosen not to endorse Harris in the presidential race.

“It is hard to pass a piece of legislation in the most deliberative body. It’s even harder to get rid of it,” he argued. “Now, once you give them an easy path, you think that the House has been dysfunctional? We’ll put them to shame.”

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