In a somewhat unexpected turn of events, Senator Joe Manchin this week declared his support for the PRO Act. On its face at least, Manchin’s endorsement seems out of character — the conservative Democrat’s name by this point has become a shorthand for the governing party’s lack of a working majority in the Senate despite its nominally majoritarian contingent. The legislation, after all, would effectively represent the most significant overhaul of American labor law in more than half a century, making unions both easier to form and harder to break. For this reason alone, no newly declared support for the act from a sitting lawmaker — especially in the Senate, where the bill is now pending after its passage through the House — should be dismissed outright or considered unwelcome.

Nevertheless, Manchin’s posture has an obvious wrinkle: namely that the senator from West Virginia also used a column in the Washington Post earlier this month to reiterate his unwavering commitment to the filibuster — the Senate rule which effectively requires sixty votes to pass many pieces of legislation even if a majority is willing to vote in favor. “It’s no accident that a state as small as West Virginia has the same number of senators as California or Texas,” Manchin wrote, mounting a familiar defense of the Senate’s anti-majoritarian tendencies:

 . . . The Founding Fathers understood that the challenges facing a rural or small state would always be very different from a more populous state. . . .  The filibuster is a critical tool to protecting that input and our democratic form of government. That is why I have said it before and will say it again to remove any shred of doubt: There is no circumstance in which I will vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster. The time has come to end these political games, and to usher a new era of bipartisanship where we find common ground on the major policy debates facing our nation.