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It is probably not a coincidence that Facebook announced its decision on whether or not to ban Donald Trump, who was already suspended, on a Friday. This is not the same as the decision of the Facebook Oversight Board at the beginning of last month. That was a decision holding, among other things, that Facebook the actual company had to make a decision within the following six months regarding the former President of the United States fitness to use Facebook. Now Facebook has banned Donald Trump from its platform for two years, which some have already pointed out offers the service the leeway to let him back on the platform just in time for the next round of Republican presidential primaries. Maybe this is what the Facebook PR bigwigs hoped to bury in the Friday wave, to be washed out into the weekend sea.
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It cannot be said that Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are responsible for placing American democracy on the edge of a cliff. This is a development decades in the making, the result of a ceaselessly radicalizing Republican Party and a Democratic opposition that has often lacked the courage and conviction to stop the slide. But now that we have truly arrived, with Republican state legislatures going all out to suppress the vote and, crucially, to make it easier to overturn future election results they do not like based on an insane lie for which they have not provided a shred of evidence, and with Republicans at the federal level blocking an investigation into an attempted insurrection following the last election result they did not like, Manchin and Sinema are playing a crucial role. They could work with the rest of the Democratic congressional caucus to arrest this slide at long last. Instead, they re sidestepping.