The Selfishness of Joe Manchin
Joe Manchin was always going to be the most difficult Democrat to get on board for the Democrat's budget package. What I didn't expect is that he'd be such a jerk about it.
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It’s All About Him
I have a piece going up today or tomorrow at MSNBC on the latest budget negotiations, but I wanted to highlight for you one point that I think merits greater attention. As we all know, Joe Manchin and Kyrtsen Sinema have been the proverbial sticks in the mud for the negotiations over the Democrat’s budget package, but what happened this week on paid family and medical leave went truly beyond the pale.
Paid family and medical leave have been a centerpiece of Democratic campaigns for decades — ever since the party finally passed an unpaid leave bill 28 years ago.
For months, it’s been clear that the bill would include that provision in the budget package. But earlier this week, Manchin decided it didn’t belong. “To put this into a reconciliation bill — it’s a major policy — is not the place to do it,” he told reporters.
That Manchin would raise this issue at the 11th hour is beyond grating. Why not bring up these concerns earlier? It’s not as if the inclusion of paid leave is a big surprise. Worse than that is the disrespect shown to Manchin’s Democratic colleagues. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York has been talking about paid leave for years and even made it the centerpiece of her 2020 presidential campaign. In the House, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut has been beating the drum on paid leave for decades. For President Joe Biden, it was a key campaign promise.
One might imagine that Manchin would have enough respect for his fellow Democrats to support a policy initiative that is so important to them — and yet he is singlehandedly killing it. If there is another Democrat who opposes the provision, I haven’t heard of one. Worst of all, his reason for demanding its omission appears to have nothing to do with the underlying policy. Instead, his complaint is a procedural one. And he’s doing this after a deadly pandemic in which the importance of paid family and medical leave has only become more evident. Due to Manchin’s opposition, America will remain the only developed country that does not offer its citizens paid family and medical leave. His 11th-hour objection also shows the duplicity that has characterized Manchin’s engagement in this process since the beginning. He has continuously moved the goalposts and made an ever-increasing series of demands — all the while giving virtually no quarter to his Democratic colleagues.
What makes this all the more maddening is that President Biden and progressive Democrats have bent over backward to accommodate the objections of Manchin and his fellow senatorial pain in the ass, Kyrsten Sinema. If not for these two senators, paid leave, tuition-free community college, and a prescription drug benefit would all likely be in the final bill. Indeed, the one unchanging demand of progressives has been that they won’t vote for Manchin and Sinema’s prized infrastructure bill unless the two senators make clear their support for the budget framework that President Biden put forward yesterday. They want the votes to happen in concert.
But even that is too much for Manchin and Sinema, who still refuse to endorse the budget package negotiated, primarily, with them. Indeed, CNN’s John Harwood gets this exactly right:
In fact, according to a report New York Times, “Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema, in turn, privately maintained that they would not be bullied into accepting social policy and climate legislation by House liberals holding up their infrastructure bill.”
Talk about chutzpah. The bullies are Manchin and Sinema!
From a political perspective, I still struggle to see how any of this makes sense. Manchin and Sinema are undercutting their own party and decreasing the chances that Democrats will hold their congressional majorities in midterm elections next year. In pushing for the removal of paid leave, tuition-free community college, and lower drug prices for seniors, they are taking away winning campaign messages for Democrats in 2022. Sinema’s obstinance has led to a plummeting of her approval ratings in Arizona and an increasingly likely primary challenge. Manchin, who won reelection in 2018 by a mere three points, is likely a long shot at winning again in 2024, no matter how much he tries to distance himself from the party’s liberal wing.
Manchin and Sinema should want a Democratic president in his first term to succeed. They should be willing to swallow some of their objections and act like team players. It’s good for them, good for the party, and good for the country. But that hasn’t happened.
From the beginning, I’ve tried to give Manchin the benefit of the doubt. He is a Democrat in one of the reddest states in America. He is not a liberal, and he thinks like a pro-business moderate. Those factors have long led me to assume that he would be the toughest nut to crack in these negotiations. So making a few concessions to secure his support made sense. But what I didn’t expect is, to put it quite frankly, that he’d be such a jerk about it.
One More Thing …
I still expect the bill to pass. Paradoxically, the worse Manchin and Sinema get, the more confident I am of passage. After all, these two can only maintain the spotlight on themselves for so long. As soon as they say yes, the media scrums will move on. And if it does pass, it’s a big f***ing deal. Universal pre-K, subsidized child care, a serious reduction in child poverty, expanded health care access, billion for Pell Grants and affordable housing, and perhaps above all $500 billion for climate change mitigation. Give Biden credit. If there was one provision in this bill that couldn’t wait, it was a major investment in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. When you combine this bill with the American Rescue Plan and the bipartisan infrastructure bill, those New Deal comparisons start to make sense.
What’s Going On?
I have no idea what will happen in Virginia’s governor’s race on Tuesday, but I’d no longer be surprised if Terry MacAuliffe loses. The polls give him the narrowest of leads, but it’s pretty clear the momentum is in Youngkin’s favor. MacAuliffe probably has a slight advantage, but the early vote numbers have not been great for Democrats, and he will need major turnout on Tuesday to prevail. If Democrats turn out, I expect he’ll win. The question now is whether that will happen.
Approval of the COVID-19 vaccine for kids could happen any day now. I’ll be first in line, but don’t be surprised if not many join me. Unfortunately, I expect that many parents will decide that the minimal risks of COVID to their kids do not make it worth getting the vaccine.
The GOP’s class of Senate candidates for 2022 increasingly looks like a rogue’s gallery. At least three prominent candidates have been accused of domestic violence, including Georgia’s Herschel Walker, who allegedly pointed a loaded gun at his ex-wife. Yet, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell endorsed Walker’s Senate bid this week.
Musical Interlude
Tonight, I’m seeing Phil Lesh and Friends at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York. The Capitol Theater is a legendary venue, which featured one of the greatest Dead shows of all time - February 18, 1971. If you haven’t heard it, I highly recommend giving it a listen - check out the jam at the end of “Wharf Rat” into “Dark Star,” one of the most beautiful pieces of music the Dead ever performed. Supposedly when Lesh heard the recording years later, it brought him to tears.
Correction
In Wednesday’s post, I wrote this: “Masks are probably the best tool we have to spread COVID transmission, other than vaccines, which Ladapo has also questioned the safety of.”
Of course, what I meant to say is: “Masks are probably the best tool we have to PREVENT COVID transmission, other than vaccines, which Ladapo has also questioned the safety of.”
It’s not easy having ADHD and editing your own newsletter, so these things will happen! My apologies, and I will try to do better the next time.
I think the political calculus is they're being aggressively lobbied and both looking very fondly at securing jobs on boards of so-and-such companies and think tanks, and getting nice stock options, depressingly.
Those two jerks are not thinking about their party's constituency. They are thinking of themselves. And what makes it so hard to understand, is what good is their contrariness doing anybody except Mitch McConnell? I would almost suspect that the two are undercover Republican operatives who are being paid handsomely to undermine the Democratic agenda and cost us our liberal democracy. History will be unkind to the two of them.