Texas Democrats meet with Manchin on voting rights

Texas Democrats met with key Senate Democrat Joe Manchin on Thursday about voting rights but all involved say making an exception to the filibuster rule never came up.

Roughly a dozen Texas Democrats who fled their state to come to Washington met Thursday in a Capitol Hill basement with the Senate Democrat who holds the key vote in Congress on voting rights legislation, West Virginia's Joe Manchin. But apparently, the subject of Manchin making an exception to the Senate's filibuster rule for voting rights never came up. Emerging from the hour-long meeting, Manchin told reporters, "It was a very good meeting. It was a very informative meeting, and basically, we've all come to a total agreement that what we want is basically to protect voting rights. That's it. A voting rights bill with guardrails. That's all." The centrist Democratic senator, who has refused to support an exception to the filibuster rule requiring 60 votes to move forward on most legislation in the 50-50 Senate, said that hot topic pushed by many voting rights activists wasn't even discussed.