As Joe Manchin abandons the climate and tax measures he used to support, those who said he wasn't negotiating in good faith appear to be have been right.
By Steve Benen
And then the conservative Democrat said he didn’t like his own blueprint, either.
In the months that followed, party leaders effectively started over, working methodically on a new package based on Manchin’s preferred framework: The new, narrower, and slimmed down bill would lower prescription drug costs, address climate change, lower the deficit, raise taxes on the wealthy, and possibly include funding for health care coverage.
Late yesterday, Manchin once again decided he no longer likes the plan he'd helped negotiate. His latest offer — at least as of this morning — is a bill that would lower prescription drug costs and maintain existing Affordable Care Act subsidies, but only for two years.
By Bill McKibben
December 20, 2021
the West Virginia senator put the kibosh on the Build Back Better bill, and with it pretty much all the legislative priorities of the White House.
There will be endless analyses of this breakup because it’s so devastating: what Manchin really did was kill momentum for a different kind of country, which began to build with Bernie Sanders’s 2016 run for the Presidency. That campaign and its 2020 successors (including Elizabeth Warren’s Presidential bid) uncovered a deep progressive streak in what was supposed to be a center-right country;
Why not use every power still at your disposal to do what you can for the country while you’ve got some power? Acting boldly carries risks. With the Senate split fifty-fifty, if you give Manchin reason to switch parties you lose your ability to appoint more judges, for instance; the power that comes with even a tenuous majority is very real. But using executive authority—and boldly—may be the only way that Biden will get anything done, as long as Manchin (and, perhaps, Kyrsten Sinema) block effective legislative action, alongside a solid phalanx of fifty Republicans. Points to Biden for trying, but, at some point, even in Washington, no really does mean no, and you need to move on as best you can.
Hunter wrote this morning:
For months, as the administration and other Democrats in the Senate tried to bargain in good faith, Manchin “led his party through months of tortured negotiations that collapsed on Thursday night, a yearlong wild goose chase.” In the process, Manchin destroyed plans to fund support for renewable energy, derailed efforts to help consumers buy electric cars, and ended any chance that the United States would take significant action to address the greatest essential threat facing the nation … all while raking in record cash from oil and gas companies and continuing to pocket the money from his highly suspect dirty coal deal.
John Podesta, former aide to President Barack Obama, put it this way: “It seems odd that Manchin would chose as his legacy to be the one man who single-handedly doomed humanity.”
But the truth is simply this: Manchin is being paid to destroy humanity. Anything, anything, anything else he says is simply filler. He is collecting that check, and nothing else matters to him.
“I honestly don’t know how he is going to look his own grandchildren in the eyes,” said Leah Stokes, a professor of environmental policy who has worked with Democrats in negotiating with Manchin.
The answer, so far as Manchin is concerned, is simply this: f**k grandchildren. Do grandchildren pay $500,000 a year for a do-nothing coal contract that is unlike anything held by anyone else in the nation? Did grandchildren shell out just under a million this year the way oil and gas did this year? If grandchildren are so concerned about having air to breathe and maybe not being trapped in an unstable hellscape as civilization collapses under the weight of billions of climate refugees and a crumbling ecosystem … then where is their super PAC?
Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia led his party and his president through months of tortured talks, with nothing to show for it as the planet dangerously heats up.
By Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman
WASHINGTON — First, he killed a plan that would have forced power plants to clean up their climate-warming pollution. Then, he shattered an effort to help consumers pay for electric vehicles. And, finally, he said he could not support government incentives for solar and wind companies or any of the other provisions that the rest of his party and his president say are vital to ensure a livable planet.
Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, who took more campaign cash from the oil and gas industry than any other senator, and who became a millionaire from his family coal business, independently blew up the Democratic Party’s legislative plans to fight climate change. The swing Democratic vote in an evenly divided Senate, Mr. Manchin led his party through months of tortured negotiations that collapsed on Thursday night, a yearlong wild goose chase that produced nothing as the Earth warms to dangerous levels.
Privately, Senate Democratic staff members seethed and sobbed on Thursday night, after more than a year of working nights and weekends to scale back, water down, trim and tailor the climate legislation to Mr. Manchin’s exact specifications, only to have it rejected inches from the finish line.
Mr. Manchin’s refusal to support the climate legislation, along with steadfast Republican opposition, effectively dooms the chances that Congress will pass any new law to tackle global warming for the foreseeable future — at a moment when scientists say the planet is nearly out of time to prevent average global temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
That is the threshold beyond which the likelihood of catastrophic droughts, floods, fires and heat waves increases significantly. The planet has already warmed an average of about 1.1 degrees Celsius.
Polling shows 58% of Americans say the federal government is doing too little to reduce the effects of global climate change.
Now it is time for President Biden to step up and do more to rein in GHG emmissions, much more. It was Donald Trump who showed us the roadmap how to go around the congress by declaring a border ‘emergency’. President Biden should use Joe Manchin’s corrupt refusal to act on Climate as his cue to declare a Climate Emergency and bypass the Koch Network’s many retainers in the Congress like Mitch McConnell, and Manchin. Catastrophic Climate Change is a genuine emergency, and it is also one of the biggest drivers of migration from the northern triangle of Central America. The Court was very deferential to the Executive Branch when a President declares an emergency, allowing the executive to exert extraordinary powers.
By Richard Wolf
By Amy Howe
Jul 26, 2019
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court ruled Friday that President Trump can use $2.5 billion in military funding to begin building a portion of his long-sought wall along the nation's southern border.
The high court's order temporarily settles just one of several skirmishes between the Trump administration and House Democrats, "blue" states led by California, and environmental groups over border wall funds.
The court's five conservative justices lifted an injunction against the border wall spending that had been imposed by a federal district court judge in California and affirmed by a federal appeals court. The injunction blocked spending while the lawsuit challenging it remains pending at the appeals court.
The five-member majority said in a brief order that the challengers appear to "have no cause of action" to review the Defense Department's authority to move up to $4 billion between accounts.”
Then a year later the Supreme Court doubled down on giving the executive branch wide freedom of action where a Presidential Emergency is declared.
By Amy Howe
Jul 31, 2020
The Supreme Court on Friday turned down a plea from opponents of President Donald Trump’s border wall to order a temporary stop to construction. By a vote of 5-4, the justices declined to lift a stay, entered just over a year ago, that allowed the federal government to continue to spend federal funds on construction while a legal challenge to the wall continues. The challengers had urged the Supreme Court to intervene last week, telling the justices that if the stay were not lifted, the Trump administration could finish the wall before the court even decides whether to take up the case on the merits.
The brief one-sentence order was the latest in the dispute over the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. The clash came to the court for the first time last year, after a federal district judge in California agreed with the challengers, the Sierra Club and the Southern Borders Communities Coalition, that government officials did not have the power to spend more than Congress had already allocated for border security. U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam barred the government from using $2.5 billion in funds originally earmarked for military-personnel funds to build the border wall, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit declined to stay that ruling while the government appealed. The Trump administration then went to the Supreme Court, which – by a vote of 5-4 last July — put Gilliam’s order on hold and allowed the government to use the Pentagon funds on the wall.
After the 9th Circuit upheld Gilliam’s decision last month, the challengers asked the Supreme Court to step in and lift the stay. Otherwise, they contended, the government would be able to finish the parts of the wall that are the subject of their challenge before the litigation concludes.
We need strong decisive leadership from the President in response to Joe Manchin sinking the BBB bill with it’s climate provisions. And we need it now. Strong leadership from President Biden will help Democrats running this fall in congressional races, and others down ballot. Most of all it would help President Biden to be seen as leading decisively on an issue with the utmost urgency,
The very future of human civilization depends on it.