Sen. Joe Manchin, in all his hubristic, mulish certainty that he’s God’s gift to legislating, is demanding a colossal amount of time and energy from the rest of us trying to save this damned country. Now that includes 39 constitutional scholars who have written to congressional leaders to say, in essence, that Manchin is full of shit. In this case, the shit he is full of is on statehood for the District of Columbia.

“As scholars of the United States Constitution, we write to correct claims that the D.C. Admission Act is vulnerable to a constitutional challenge in the courts,” write the 39 scholars, including Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law, Erwin Chemerinsky of UC Berkeley Law, Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia, and Leah Litman of the University of Michigan Law School. There is “no constitutional barrier,” they write, to prevent Washington, D.C., from “entering the Union through a congressional proclamation, pursuant to the Constitution’s Admissions Clause, just like the 37 other states that have been admitted since the Constitution was adopted.”

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Manchin is laboring under the impression—or excuse—that admitting the district as a state would require a constitutional amendment. Earlier this month, he said on West Virginia MetroNews’ Talkline radio that he had taken a “deep dive” on the issue and knew what he was talking about. “D.C. statehood is not a new one,” Manchin said, and remarked that the Justice Department had studied the issue from the 1960s to the 1980s. “They all came to the same conclusion: If Congress wants to make D.C. a state, it should propose a constitutional amendment. It should propose a constitutional amendment and let the people of America vote.” His home state of West Virginia, by the way, broke from Virginia in 1861 and Congress passed a bill to declare it a state in 1863.

The actual constitutional scholars disagree. “Congress’s exercise of its express constitutional authority to decide to admit a new state is a classic political question, which courts are highly unlikely to interfere with, let alone attempt to bar,” they write in the letter. They also obliquely refer to the controversial splintering of Virginia and West Virginia by pointing out that the Supreme Court “has never interfered with Congress’s admission of a state, even when potentially legitimate constitutional objections existed.” Those objections were raised in 1863, when some argued that West Virginia’s statehood violated Admissions Clause, the scholars point out. “The Supreme Court, however, did not bar West Virginia’s admission; to the contrary, it later tacitly approved of it,” the letter says.

The House passed Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton’s D.C. statehood bill on April 22. The legislation would preserve the immediate surroundings of the White House, Capitol Hill, the Supreme Court, and the National Mall as the federal district and turn the rest of what is now Washington, D.C. into the “State of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth.” It would also give the 714,153 residents of the district the full benefits of being U.S. citizens—representation to go along with their taxation, and the right to have a fully functioning local government that is not at the mercy of the whims of Congress.

That representation would include a member of the House who had an actual vote in Congress. Norton is still only a delegate. She’s a powerful voice, but has no vote when it counts. The people of Washington, D.C., have no U.S. senators, and yes, the population of the district is larger than that of either Wyoming or Vermont. That the new state would be plurality-Black (in stark contrast to both Wyoming or Vermont) has just about everything to do with Republican opposition to the fundamentally patriotic ideal of Washington statehood.

That fact—that Republicans are not even attempting to hide the white supremacist motivations behind the Big Lie and all their voter suppression tactics—that’s something that should make any Democrat think about what they’re enabling by allowing Republican obstruction. Especially when it comes to restoring and then preserving democracy.

It’s Kyrsten Sinema, who McConnell has made a bestie of, or Manchin, who has the unmitigated hubris to dismiss what’s happening before his very eyes with a sniff and a thoroughly misplaced sense of superiority, and the sense that he and he alone can bring bipartisanship back to the Senate.

Sen. Mitch McConnell wasn’t joking when he said he is “100 percent” focused “on stopping” any initiative from President Joe Biden. He said: “What we have in the United States Senate is totally unity from Susan Collins to Ted Cruz in opposition to what the new Biden administration is trying to do to this country.”

That includes getting a shot at a second term. It includes having a House and Senate in Democratic control after 2022 to make sure democracy is preserved. McConnell can’t let that happen; he can’t allow Democrats to achieve Washington, D.C. statehood or end gerrymandering or eradicate voter suppression or cause the tidal wave of dark money funding Republican campaigns to dry up. McConnell—and every single Republican who refuses to buck him—are intent on maintaining the minority rule status quo that has allowed Republicans representing a significant minority of the populace to call all the shots on pretty much everything.

The filibuster has to go. It’s as simple as that.