Cornel West Says Joe Manchin Is ‘Gonna Have To Get Off His Symbolic Crackpipe’

During a discussion on voting rights on CNN Thursday, Cornell West had some advice for Sen. Joe Manchin (R-WV) that he hoped would help the senator understand that Republicans will not work with Democrats to pass voting rights legislation such as the For the People Act or the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

Both bills are opposed by Republicans in the evenly split 50-50 Senate, where 60 votes are required to get past a threatened filibuster to start or end debate.

Don Lemon played an excerpt from a CNN interview with Manchin from earlier in the evening to get West’s reaction.

“Ok what do you think?” Lemon said. “He’s saying he still wants to work with Republicans to get it done. Is the choice now between the filibuster and democracy?”

West replied that it’s time for Manchin to stop smoking “his symbolic crackpipe”:

Yeah. I think Brother Joe coming out of West Virginia is some of my favorite folk I know from West Virginia. But I must say that he’s gonna have to get off his symbolic crackpipe too, that you [are] gonna have to do away with the filibuster in order to get any work done because you’ve got a right-wing party that’s authoritarian with deep neofascist sensibilities that has no commitment to democratic processes, no commitment to democratic values. And then at the same time you’ve got Democrats who run around talking about being bipartisan, but for the most part they lack a backbone. They don’t have enough fight.

Manchin has long been an advocate of bipartisan bills and has said repeatedly that he will not vote to abolish the filibuster. Earlier this month, the Senate failed to advance the For the People Act, for which Manchin voted after some modifications were made at his request. All 50 Republicans opposed the bill.

Watch above, via CNN.