You know what? We do have to vote harder in 2022 than we’ve ever voted before. We have to vote in these midterms like the very fate of the Earth is at stake. Because it pretty much is. We have to spend the next 112 days working our asses off to make sure that Sen. Joe Manchin is kicked to the curb by a Democratic majority big enough to end his reign of terror.
The West Virginia Democrat and the fossil fuel industry’s primary representative in Congress isn’t on the ballot officially this cycle, so we can’t actually kick him out. But we can make him irrelevant. We can elect a Senate majority that will cast him aside, end the filibuster, pass vital legislation to save the planet and all of our civil, voting, and reproductive rights, and maybe even restore the Supreme Court. We can get a big enough Senate majority to demand he step down as chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee—he’s already being challenged there by colleagues!
We can get a majority big enough that he becomes a pariah and the only person willing to sit with him at lunch is Maine Sen. Susan Collins.
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By now you’ve seen how Manchin has decided to pull the plug the rug out from Democrats again. For months, months, Manchin has been stringing his colleagues along, promising them he would support the climate and tax hike parts of the tattered remains of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan—the visionary social, economic, and climate change package that would define Biden’s presidency. After successfully conning the rest of his party into splitting out and going along with the gift to the fossil-fuel industry that was the infrastructure bill, Manchin immediately reneged on helping Democrats with the rest on the flimsy excuse that Biden hurt his feelings by including his name in a White House statement.
The Washington Post broke the news Thursday night that Manchin was torpedoing the two elements of the plan that he’s been negotiating with Democrats on all year: climate and energy, and raising taxes on the wealthy. The stuff that he has been saying for months that there was a way forward on. The stuff Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and committee chairs like Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) have been slaving over to shape to Manchin’s demands, whittling away the critical elements necessary right now for curbing climate change.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat my disappointment here, especially since nearly all issues in the climate and energy space had been resolved,” said Wyden after Manchin’s latest betrayal. “This is our last chance to prevent the most catastrophic—and costly—effects of climate change,” he continued in a statement. “We can’t come back in another decade and forestall hundreds of billions—if not trillions—in economic damage and undo the inevitable human toll.”
There’s another senator who would probably be happy to see Manchin lose the chair of the key committee in the Senate for working on climate issues.
The only prayer we’ve got of that happening is this November. The Senate has to stay in Democratic hands, and it has to have a big enough majority to make Manchin irrelevant and to scare his buddy, Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, enough about a 2024 primary challenge to get her back in line. Alternatively, we elect enough Democrats to render them obsolete.
Now is the time to channel all your rage over everything that Manchin and Sinema have obstructed, over everything the U.S. Supreme Court has done in just this session, at everything Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has done to destroy democracy.
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