No single man from a small population state, voted into office by just a little more than half of them, should have this much power:
Manchin’s feud with progressive Democrats centers on a basic difference in their assessment of the Republican Party. To many of his colleagues, the G.O.P. has become an overt enemy of democracy, by perpetuating Trump’s lies about his loss in 2020 and rewriting state laws in ways that could allow them to overturn future elections. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has stated plainly, “One hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration,” an echo of his comment, in 2010, that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term President.” McConnell, in that view, will never coöperate, because doing so could allow Democrats to win the next elections by claiming policy achievements and a breakthrough in partisan gridlock. Harry Reid, a senator from Nevada for three decades and the Democratic Senate Majority Leader from 2007 to 2015, told me that Manchin underestimates the change in D.C. culture. “We’ve never had it like this before,” he said. “When Lyndon Johnson was Majority Leader for six years, he overcame two filibusters. In my first six years as Leader, I had to face and overcome more than a hundred filibusters. I think that you cannot expect the Senate to be a place where it’s kind of ‘Kumbaya,’ where you hold hands and sing.”
Get a load of this:
On January 6th, when word circulated on the Senate floor that Trump supporters had stormed the Capitol, Manchin did not initially assume the worst. “I’ve always been for a good protest,” he recalled. “My instinct was, Let them in! They’re raising all kinds of hell and hollering. Let them in! Let’s talk!” Soon, he glimpsed the horror of it—“Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine our form of government being attacked,” he said—and, during the impeachment trial, he voted to convict. But Manchin never broke faith with the Republican Party, and he was determined to work with it again.
That “instinct” makes me wonder if he’s all there. Did he really not see that Donald Trump the demagogue had just spent the last four years attacking our form of government, ratcheting up the assault to a fever pitch in the last days of the campaign and afterwards? I think he’s not paying attention. Maybe his buddies in the Senate are all winking and nodding to him about Trump and his power but anyone with a brain can see that he has tens of millions of followers loaded for bear and that Mitch McConnell and his minions are fine with their unpatriotic radicalism if it helps them preserve their power.
And in case you are wondering about what really makes him tick well, we have the answer. It’s his fucking ego, of course. He’s a diva:
His constant triangulation makes him mercurial. “What he stands up and says from one caucus lunch to the next doesn’t match up,” a Democratic strategist said, “and he’s not the type of guy that’s going to go home and read a fifty-page briefing book.” In March, Manchin raised the prospect of making the filibuster “a little bit more painful,” by reviving the requirement for the marathon speeches known as the talking filibuster. Progressives rejoiced, but soon he expressed reservations about the idea. “If you have a talking filibuster, basically, you can just wait that one out,” he told me. “It doesn’t really achieve anything.”
In his office, I told him that much of Washington was asking a version of the same question: What does Joe Manchin really want? He flashed an irritated smile. “Can you believe that? It’s like I came here to hold people hostage,” he said. He repeated the question back to me. “What does Joe Manchin want? Son of a bitch—they think that they can spend a billion dollars or a hundred million dollars and that’ll take care of making it right?” He went on, “They want me to change. To agree. I say, No, I’m not going to change.”
Hello Joe Lieberman. It’s not so nice to have you back where you don’t belong.