Joe Manchin Has Wrecked the Biden
Presidency—Perhaps He’ll Also Liberate It
The need to appease the West Virginia senator is gone
now, and not just on the climate.
By Bill
McKibben
December
20, 2021
Manchin didn’t just derail Joe Biden’s
legislative agenda; he also kept the President from using another suite of powers
that belong to the executive alone.
“I’ve tried
everything humanly possible. I can’t get there,” Joe Manchin said. “This is a
no on this legislation. I have tried everything I know to do.” And with that pathetic
brushoff—he sounded like a feckless TV bachelor explaining why he couldn’t hand
his rose to a hopeful contestant—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;
Biden got the Presidency but Bernie got the bill, a serious return to the days
of L.B.J. and the idea that big government can solve problems.
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