Joe Manchin doesn't support Kamala Harris in her filibuster reform. That's stupid.

Senator Joe Manchin, IW.V., has announced that he will not endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president. Unfortunately, he is withdrawing his support for one of the dumbest reasons imaginable.

Earlier this month, Manchin appeared to indicate he was considering supporting Harris, but on Tuesday he said he had decided against it because she had called for an end to the filibuster tactic to pass federal legislation protecting abortion rights.

“Shame on her,” he told CNN. “She knows the filibuster tactic is the Holy Grail of democracy. It's the only thing that gets us talking to each other and working together. If she gets rid of that, it would be a House of Representatives on steroids.”

He continued: “I think this has the potential to fundamentally destroy our country, and my country is more important to me than any one person or any one person's ideology. … I think this is the most horrible thing.”

Manchin's announcement was odd because Harris has been calling for a change to the filibuster to pass abortion (and voting) legislation for years. Why is he focusing on it now? Manchin told CNN he had hoped she would change course as a Democratic presidential candidate. But when she called for the elimination of the “filibuster for Roe” in an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio, he concluded he could no longer consider supporting her.

But on a more substantive level, Manchin’s conception of the filibuster tactic as the “Holy Grail” of democracy is, well, confusing.

The basic principles of democracy are popular representation and majority rule. However, the filibuster has become a tool for the minority party in the Senate to thwart simple majority rule. It is a peculiar procedural device designed to delay or block a vote on a bill. In theory, the filibuster tactic could be used to gain broader consensus on particularly large and sensitive issues, but in modern times it has effectively become a burdensome 60-vote majority threshold for passage of all legislation, a bottleneck that kills most major bills and makes major reforms virtually impossible.

What makes the filibuster tactic even worse is that it is being used in a legislative body that already rejects the principle of popular representation, disenfranchising millions of Americans by overrepresenting certain populations (people in small states and rural areas) while essentially making the votes of people in more populous states and areas count less. In other words, Manchin's Democratic “Holy Grail” is really a way for minority parties in a minority institution to hold the governing party hostage.

Manchin and many other supporters of the filibuster tactic use language that can suggest that the filibuster tactic was part of the fundamental vision of American democracy.

It wasn't. The filibuster isn't in the Constitution, nor was it a central part of the Founding Fathers' vision for America. (Some scholars have even argued it's unconstitutional.) As political scientist Sarah Binder points out, the filibuster was an accidental byproduct of an attempt to simplify the rules for stopping debate in the Senate in the early 19th century. One indication that it wasn't used intentionally is that the first real filibusters didn't occur until decades after the rule change that gave rise to them as a legislative strategy in the first place; creative lawmakers discovered it as a way to block legislation.

Senator Kyrsten Sinema (I-Arizona) took aim at Harris with a post on X in which she wrote that eliminating the filibuster to pass abortion law was an “absolutely terrible” idea because “eliminating the filibuster to codify Roe v. Wade also allows a future Congress to ban all abortions nationwide.”

Sinema is right that eliminating the filibuster could have two sides. But most Republicans — including former President Donald Trump — know that calling for a nationwide repeal of abortion rights could be an extinction-level event for Republicans in federal office. Moreover, if Democrats succeed in enshrining abortion protections in law, it becomes far more politically dangerous for Republicans to call for its repeal, since it is politically easier to defend widespread rights and benefits than to dismantle them. (Consider, for example, the resilience of Obamacare; flawed as it is, Democrats succeeded in mobilizing voters against the GOP on the argument that Republicans wanted to abolish it.)

But Manchin doesn't have to agree with all of my arguments about the filibuster to realize that he has lost sight of the bigger picture when it comes to setting clear limits on American democracy.

There are only two candidates who have a chance of winning on Election Day. One of them has committed to accepting the election results, the other has not. We can debate the pros and cons of filibuster reform, and filibuster reform itself can be rolled back. But accepting vote counts is not debatable, and it is much harder for America to recover from a possible second coup attempt in two elections. Manchin's rhetoric that Harris is undermining American democracy seems extremely short-sighted given the clear and present danger Trump poses to it.