Manchin promised to back his ‘Republican friends.’ Instead, he betrayed them.
Well, that is precisely what happened. Biden rebuffed an offer from Republicans to negotiate a compromise bill, and Senate Democrats jammed his $1.9 trillion spending plan down people’s throats on a party-line vote, using the budget reconciliation process that requires only a simple majority to pass. And Manchin provided the deciding vote that let them do it.
The lesson for conservatives is clear: Manchin is not going to save us. He’s from West Virginia, one of the reddest states in the country, so he needs to make a show of standing up to his party. But a show is all that it is. When Manchin announced he would oppose Biden’s nomination of Neera Tanden to run the Office of Management and Budget, some saw it as a sign of his willingness to buck his party. In fact, it was nothing more than political cover for his coming capitulation on his party’s $1.9 trillion miasma of special-interest spending. To provide further cover, Manchin voted (along with seven other Democrats) against an effort by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to eviscerate the Byrd rule and include a minimum-wage increase in the budget reconciliation bill. He voted for Sen. Rob Portman’s (R-Ohio) amendment to continue unemployment benefits at the current level (before flip-flopping and voting with the Democratic leadership to wipe out the very provision for which he had just voted). But in the end, he voted with his party to run roughshod over the Republican minority and pass one of the largest government spending bills in history on a partisan basis — exactly what he had promised not to do.
Already, Manchin is signaling that he will do the same on Biden’s next big priority — a $2 trillion to $4 trillion climate and infrastructure spending bill. Once again, he is talking tough for his constituents back home. “I’m not going to do it through reconciliation,” as with the covid spending bill, Manchin told Axios’s Mike Allen. “I am not going to get on a bill that cuts [Republicans] out completely before we start” (emphasis added). The message to the White House is clear: Make a pretense of actually negotiating this time, but in the end I’ll be with you.
That’s not all. Manchin has said he will “never” provide Democrats with the deciding vote they need to eliminate the legislative filibuster. Just last week, when a reporter asked if setbacks to Biden’s agenda would cause him to reconsider, he replied: “Jesus Christ, what don’t you understand about ‘never’?” But now, all of a sudden, Manchin says he is open to reforming the filibuster. On “Meet the Press” on Sunday, he said “now if you want to make it a little bit more painful, make him stand there and talk, I’m willing to look at any way we can” do that.
This makes no sense. The Senate eliminated the “talking filibuster” to help the majority party, not the minority. Republicans would have no trouble sustaining a talking filibuster, and unlike with the current system, no other Senate business — confirmation votes, other legislation, etc. — could proceed. Returning to a talking filibuster would make filibusters more effective, not less. More likely, Democrats will try to “reform” the filibuster by exempting legislation Biden wants to pass and Republicans want to block (such as granting statehood to the District of Columbia), or creating a process to overturn Supreme Court decisions by simple majority, hollowing out the filibuster until it is all but meaningless. Based on his covid relief capitulation, Republicans should not count on Manchin to stop them.
For a short time, it looked as though this was Manchin’s Senate. It looked as though he was someone who would stand by his commitments to those he calls his “Republican friends” and that there was hope the bipartisan group that he started with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) to pass bipartisan covid relief during the Trump administration had a future under Biden. But it’s now clear: Manchin and the other so-called moderate Democrats are only interested in unity and compromise when Republicans are in power. When Democrats are in power, power rules.
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