The New Yorker always has interesting profiles and I got to reading one about West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat who is the one bulwark in the U.S. Senate against a Republican majority.
That is, in a Senate divided 50/50, Manchin is the swing vote on the Democratic side. And he has been known to oppose the hopes and dreams of the Democratic Party’s center-left coalition.
So lots of people are writing about him, including the New Yorker, which bent over backward to avoid talking about one of the inner strengths that Manchin has: His determination to be a Catholic politician, even in an age in which compromise is all but impossible.
Tmatt has covered Manchin beforehand and these days, Manchin is very much in the headlines these days because if anything, the diference between two major parties is massive.
The story begins with a near-fatal accident involving two Senators, one of them Manchin.
In another year, the prospect of losing two Democratic senators overboard in an ice storm might be greeted with a certain wry resignation among Washington’s political class. This year, it inspires panic, at least among Democrats: in a 50-50 Senate, the Party’s agenda is only one vote — or one heartbeat — from oblivion. Manchin, in particular, holds extraordinary power.
As perhaps the Senate’s most conservative Democrat, he often breaks from the Party, which gives him a de-facto veto over a large swath of the Administration’s agenda. In the first months of Joe Biden’s Presidency, Manchin tanked the nomination of Neera Tanden as budget director (he disapproved of her tweets), opposed raising the corporate tax rate to twenty-eight per cent (he preferred twenty-five per cent), and single-handedly narrowed unemployment benefits in a COVID-relief bill.
Over and over, Manchin said that he was driven by a fundamental faith in bipartisanship, a belief that Democrats could and must find Republican support for their legislation—a posture so at odds with the present hostilities in Washington that it evoked a man hoisting his glass for a toast while his guests lunged at one another with steak knives…
Biden and Manchin have obvious points in common—two white, Catholic Joes, in their seventies, both former football players who take pride in their working-class roots, long after becoming wealthy.
What drives Manchin, what gives him the courage to stand alone as he so often does?
