United States: for Joe Biden, a democratic nightmare named Joe Manchin

With such allies, you don’t need to have enemies. The main obstacle to a series of reforms wanted by US Democratic President Joe Biden does not come from the other side of the political spectrum, but from his own ranks. His name is Joe Manchin III, the senator from West Virginia, and seems determined to block out anything in the president’s agenda that might appeal to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Joe Manchin has just opposed, Wednesday October 27, to a new tax on the super-rich proposed by the government. A measure supposed to offer Joe Biden a financing plan for his vast infrastructure program. Ironically, if the president needed to come up with this idea of ​​a new tax on large fortunes, it was because his original proposal – to increase the corporate tax rate – had been rejected by a few Democrats, including Joe Manchin.

The Senate at his feet

The 74-year-old senator is not the first legislative feat that angered Joe Biden. He also opposed, Tuesday, a financial revaluation of maternity or paternity leave. He had blocked the appointment, in February, of the very progressive Neera Tanden to head the budget of the White House and had succeeded, on his own, in lowering the level of unemployment benefits included in the American stimulus plan to get out of the health crisis, adopted in February 2021.

But he has truly earned his reputation as the number one enemy of the progressive wing of his party and the Democratic best friend of the conservatives by opposing the White House climate plan over and over again. A few days before Joe Biden’s arrival in Scotland for the crucial COP26 summit, the president’s inability to pass an ambitious program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because of a single senator , what is more of his own camp, is the worst effect.

Joe Manchin is, in fact, “the man who controls the Senate”, as The New Yorker wrote in a long survey devoted to this politician in June 2021. His vote became central in a chamber divided into two, with 50 Democratic or related senators and 50 Republicans. And since he embodies the centrist wing of the party more than any other Democrat, he is currently being courted on all sides.

Joe Manchin’s insistence on voting against his camp never ceases to ruffle the hair of his fellow Democrats. “The sight of a Democratic representative from one of the poorest states doing everything to cut aid to the poorest makes a lot of Democrats angry. I think Joe Manchin is completely bogus and is only saying bullshit “, got carried away an elected representative of the Democratic Party questioned by the Wall Street Journal.

Because West Virginia is one of the five poorest states in the country. And Joe Manchin often presents himself as the child of the most lost hole in this already sparsely populated state. He comes, in fact, from Farmington, a small town a few kilometers from Charleston which has only 235 inhabitants, where his grandfather, an Italian emigrant, settled in 1904.

In the name of king coal

In a way, Joe Manchin and Joe Biden would have everything to get along. Both like to recall their humble origins – the current president never misses an opportunity to point out that the media nickname him “Middle class Joe” – both have built their own. fortune before entering politics, and they claim above all to be pragmatic centrists, preferring bipartisan dialogue to ideological crusade.

Except that they seem to have become the political enemy brothers of the moment. There are several reasons for this antagonism, but the main one relates to the links, proven and claimed by the principal concerned, between Joe Manchin and the industries of the fossil fuel sector.

Before becoming a senator, this native of a state that has long been the country’s mining lungs built part of his fortune as a coal trader at the head of Enersystem, a company he founded in 1988. Even if he ceded the head of the group to his son when he entered politics, Joe Manchin still owns shares there. worth over a million dollars.

Joe Manchin therefore has a very personal interest in the health of the fossil fuel sector. He is also the senator who has received the most campaign funding from the oil and gas industries, according to the site OpenSecret which tracks the amounts spent by lobbyists in Washington.

No wonder, then, that this politician strongly opposes bills that promote renewable energies and plan to pay polluting industries to close their factories, a significant part of which is still in existence. West Virginia.

Obsessed with bipartisan compromise

This does not explain Joe Manchin’s opposition to many other measures or appointments proposed by the Biden administration. For the New Yorker, the senator’s attitude stems from his obsession with bipartisan compromise.

He thus voted with the Republicans in favor of the very controversial nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, accused of sexual assault, to the Supreme Court in 2018, in the name of this conviction that one should never cut ties with the opposing camp, recalls the New York Times.

And when Joe Biden introduced his bill to protect the right to vote in June 2021, Joe Manchin opposed it assuring “that legislation on subjects as important as the right to vote should result from a bipartisan agreement”. This opposition had offered an important victory to the Republicans who, in several states like Texas, passed laws aimed at restricting the right to vote.

For the other Democrats, every time Joe Manchin opposes the president in the name of the bipartisan consensus, he plays into the hands of a Republican party which, in this post-Donald Trump era, does not care any more about this. notion. “He will have to explain to me why I should seek to reach an agreement with a party whose main political message today is based on the lie that the election was ‘stolen’ by the Democrats”, asks Walt Auvil, another Democrat from West Virginia, interviewed by the New Yorker.

In the eyes of his detractors, Joe Manchin represents a vestige of another time when it was still possible to negotiate with the political opponent. And this vestige, almost on its own, prevents the world’s leading power from moving forward with the proposed reforms.