![]() Even when Republicans tested that view by obstructing a voting rights bill he crafted as a compromise solution to the matter, Manchin, joined by Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, remained firm. Manchin is also a staunch defender of the filibuster, a Senate rule requiring 60 votes to advance legislation which he insists encourages consensus in a deeply tribal chamber. ‘What he makes clear over and over again is that he can’t close the deal, and that you can’t trust what he says,’ said Pramila Jayapal. Manchin’s vote has been critical to approving Biden’s judicial nominees, and he ultimately signed off on the president’s massive Covid relief legislation over unanimous Republican opposition.īut Manchin has joined Republicans to imperil some of Biden’s nominations, including Neera Tanden, who the president tapped to run the Office of Management and Budget, and Sarah Bloom Raskin, who he chose to serve on the Federal Reserve. His victory helped Democrats build their fragile majority, with vice-president Kamala Harris serving as the 51st and tie-breaking vote. He was elected to the Senate in 2010, two years after Biden left to become vice-president, and won re-election in 2018. Manchin, who began his career in state politics and served as governor, has so far defied the state’s lurch to the right. In 2020, every single county in West Virginia voted for Donald Trump. ![]() Once one of the most reliably Democratic states, West Virginia began to turn sharply against the party, as the party bled support from white, working-class voters. Manchin comes from a political family in West Virginia, part of a legacy of Industrial-era Democrats who formed the party’s blue-collar base. At one point, he even offered to leave the Democratic party if his colleagues thought he’d become too much of an “embarrassment” – an offer he said they roundly rejected. But no one has done so more boldly or more frequently than Manchin.įiscally conscious and socially conservative, Manchin is glaringly out of step with today’s Democratic party – and he knows it. In a Senate divided evenly between the parties, any one Democrat could play king- or queen-maker. “At some point you have to take the man at his word that he is not going to do that which he says he is not going to do,” said Christopher Regan, a former vice-chair of the West Virginia Democratic party who worked with Manchin. It was in effect an acknowledgment that after more than a year of tortuous negotiations, Manchin could not be moved, not by activists, not by his colleagues, and not even by the president of the United States. “Let me be clear: if the Senate will not move to tackle the climate crisis and strengthen our domestic clean energy industry, I will take strong executive action to meet this moment,” he said. ![]() Joe Biden participates in a virtual meeting with leaders of the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate (MEF) in Washington in June. The president outlined his preferred course of action in a statement sent after he held a controversial meeting with the Saudi leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, during which rising fuel prices and oil production were top of the agenda. The demands came at an inauspicious moment for the party’s leaders: the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, who has been leading the fragile talks with Manchin, is stuck quarantining at home in Brooklyn after a Covid diagnosis while Biden was on a high-stakes trip to the Middle East. With his economic agenda in peril, Biden urged Democrats in Congress to accept what they could get done immediately to lower healthcare costs and vowed to act unilaterally on the climate crisis. “Inflation is wreaking havoc on everybody’s life,” Manchin told the host, Hoppy Kercheval.īut he offered an ultimatum: Democrats could accept a narrow deal now or try to pass a larger plan later, if the economic forecast improves. It was “not prudent” for Democrats to approve a major spending package while Americans faced painfully high costs for food, fuel and rent, the 74-year-old said in a radio interview. In a private discussion on Thursday, Manchin told Democratic leaders that he could not support a bill that contains new spending to combat climate change or raises taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations.īy Friday morning, he had clarified his position. “Rage keeps me from tears,” Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts and sponsor of the Green New Deal, wrote on Twitter late on Thursday, as news broke of Manchin’s opposition.
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