Two big stories hit the wires today, and reading between the lines in them, it seems like everybody is fed up with Sen. Joe Manchin’s back-stabbing of fellow Democrats, and they’re increasingly willing to talk about it. Obliquely and cautiously, of course, but nonetheless on the record. It seems that fellow Democrats are now willing to talk about just how untrustworthy he is.
The White House has been burned so many times by Manchin that they’re not going to say anything specific about how or whether they are proceeding with negotiations over rebuilding Build Back Better, the big climate and domestic investments bill that Manchin scuttled last year. “I would quite explicitly not comment on the conversations that are happening,” Brian Deese, Biden’s National Economic Council director, told reporters recently. “I don’t think that has served anyone particularly well.”
It has indeed not, since Manchin has reneged time and time again. At this point, everyone involved is very carefully not saying anything about what Manchin has told them he’s willing to do, because every time they’ve gone out on a limb about what’s he’s committed to, he denies it. The most the White House would say is what Manchin has gone on record talking about as his priorities. “There are things like prescription drugs and lower utility bills that people understand are popular—are practical,” Deese told Politico. “If we can get movement, it will be in exactly that frame.”
RELATED STORY: Manchin offers a path to Biden’s building back priorities, ideas Sinema has already nixed
So the White House and Democrats are at the point of telling Manchin to write the bill himself, and saying nothing more about it. “This is really up to Joe,” one person involved in the process told Politico. “It’s basically going to be the Manchin reconciliation bill when all is said and done.” Another said “This is a matter of Joe Manchin coming up with a bill that he’s comfortable with. … He is the way he is.”
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That’s no guarantee of getting Manchin on board, however, as his fellow moderate Democrats in the Senate well know. That’s what they did with the voting rights effort. Manchin was the single Democratic senator who opposed HR 1, the For the People Act the House passed early in 2021. So they had him write his own bill, one that he promised he would get Republicans to support. That didn’t turn out so well.
Rolling Stone has the other big new Manchin story about how he scuttled this effort, and it’s not a flattering portrayal from fellow Democrats interviewed—more than 30 key people inside and outside of Congress who worked on the voting rights legislation. It starts with Sen. Jon Tester, the Montana Democrat who has been spending way too much time trying to get Manchin to play along, telling Colorado Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, “I think we’re gonna get this voting-rights thing done.”
Yeah, right. Tester—along with Sens. Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Angus King (I-VT)—had been painstakingly working with Manchin not just to draft the bill, but to get him to agree to a process that would let it pass. And Tester really thought that they were there, that Manchin really wanted what he said he wanted—“some good rule changes to make the place work better.”
Here’s how it went: “At the end of one of their calls, Tester recalls saying that with everyone in agreement on a filibuster deal, all they had to do was put the finishing touches on the voting legislation itself and they were ready to proceed. ‘Yeah,’ Manchin replied, according to Tester.”
Kaine spent the most time working with Manchin on the process, including the night he spent in his car, stranded in a snow storm out side of D.C. He told Rolling Stone that he too had thought Manchin was on board making the changes to the filibuster necessary to get it passed. “I thought we were there a couple of times,” Kaine says. “But maybe that was just me.”
“It was like riding a roller coaster,” Sen. Tester told Rolling Stone. “There were many nights when I went to bed and I thought, ‘This thing is done. We just have to hammer out the details.’ But then something would always happen,” he added. “I don’t know what happened. I can guess. But I don’t know.”
In the meantime, the other back-stabber in the caucus was apparently feeling neglected. Her spokesman, John LaBombard, says as much. He told Rolling Stone that no one was paying her enough attention, assuming that she wouldn’t ultimately stand alone against the reform if they got Manchin on board. Team Sen. Kyrsten Sinema wants the world to know that she’s as much of a diva as Manchin. “It would be a mistake on anyone’s part to engage in any wishful thinking that Sen. Sinema’s policy or tactical positions are somehow contingent on the positions of other colleagues and are not sincerely held,” LaBombard says.
So that’s why she gave that big, obnoxious floor speech—the longest one in her career—against changing the filibuster to save democracy. She was peeved that Manchin was getting all the attention, apparently.
Which is also a thing to remember when working with Manchin on the other stuff: Sinema. Some of the stuff Manchin has said he would agree to (and again, all of that has to be taking with several blocks of salt) are thing Sinema has already nixed. Namely, raising taxes on super rich people and corporations, since they’re presumably paying her way these days.
The level of frustration with Manchin openly expressed by White House staff and Democratic senators suggests that they’ve reached the end of their capacity for patience with him. They all came as close to saying he can’t be negotiated with in good faith as they’re going to with him being a colleague and this being the Senate.
As far as Sinema is concerned, who the hell knows. At this point there truly is just one solution: Increase the Democrats’ majority and make them obsolete. Meanwhile, the two of them are doing everything they can to sabotage the 2022 midterm election for Democrats.
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