While speaking to reporters on Jan. 18, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) rejected his party’s notion that tougher state-level election laws would obstruct voting rights, a bad sign for Democrats hoping to sway Manchin into weakening the filibuster. After a string of policy failures for President Joe Biden before Congress’s winter recess, Democrats, looking for some victory in advance of a midterm season that’s expected to go in Republicans’s favor, made a frantic push to finally approve election legislation. Because all 50 Senate Republicans have opposed Democratic election proposals, the majority party has little hope of approving any partisan elections measure through the normal processes of the Senate. To get the legislation through the Senate without Republican support, Democrats would have to weaken or abolish the filibuster. After a week of what filibuster-proponent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) described as “harried discussions” on how to achieve this end, Sinema and Manchin announced …