Although Joe Manchin has been holding up Joe Biden’s infrastructure plans for a while now over the price tag, the West Virginia senator has been somewhat cagey about his actual demands. Not as guarded, perhaps, as Kyrsten Sinema, his fellow Democratic holdout; where she has refused to state her terms to anyone outside the White House, Manchin at least engages with his colleagues and speaks publicly about his objections to the reconciliation bill. But he’s been difficult to pin down nonetheless, adding to the frustrations of Democrats as they seek to deliver on the centerpiece of Biden’s domestic agenda.
Finally, while his terms are coming into clearer view, they’re only casting the future of the infrastructure bills in a thicker cloud of uncertainty. Now, the question isn’t only if the Biden bills will pass. It’s whether the bills will be recognizable if they do. Axios on Sunday reported that Manchin has given something of an ultimatum to the White House: He’ll support the child tax credit that would be one of the package’s biggest boosts to working families, but only if it...well, does less to help working families. Manchin is asking for the credit to include a work requirement and an income cap that would make families earning more than $60,000 ineligible for assistance—a demand that would weaken a key part of the spending bill. He is also, as Axios reported, continuing to rail against provisions of the reconciliation bill that are crucial to addressing climate change, supposedly because of concerns that the shift to clean energy the Biden plan would help usher in could cost jobs in the coal state of West Virginia. The Times reported Friday that Manchin, who personally has financial ties to the coal industry, opposes “a program to rapidly replace the nation’s coal- and gas-fired power plants with wind, solar and nuclear energy” that’s seen as key to Biden’s climate agenda.
In short: Manchin is offering his party a path forward on the bills, but only if they are dramatically diluted—a position that might appeal to a White House desperate to at least get some of its priorities through, but that is already turning off others in the party, particularly the progressives who are leading the fight for Biden’s agenda. “The richest country in the world,” Senator Bernie Sanders wrote Sunday evening, “can afford to invest in the needs of working people.”
Sanders, who as chair of the Budget Committee has helped lead the fight to get the bills passed, and Manchin, one of two conservative Democrats holding them up, have been in something of a row in recent days. On Friday, Sanders penned an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, in Manchin’s home state, to outline the contents of the bill—which have too often gotten lost in the political debate over the legislation—and to urge Manchin to support it. “This is a pivotal moment in modern American history,” Sanders wrote. “We now have a historic opportunity to support the working families of West Virginia, Vermont, and the entire country and create policy which works for all, not just the few.” That evening, Manchin fired back with a tweet as defiant as it was smug: “I will not vote for a reckless expansion of government programs,” Manchin posted. “No op-ed from a self-declared Independent socialist is going to change that.”
As usual, Manchin cast himself as a sober-minded check on heedless Democrats, a self-righteous guardian of his constituents’ best interests. “This isn’t the first time an out-of-stater has tried to tell West Virginians what is best for them despite having no relationship to our state,” Manchin wrote. But really, who of the two senators is being more prudent, acting more in the interests of West Virginians and the country as a whole: The one who calling to address the facts of rising income inequality and climate change, or the one arguing against Medicare expansion from the deck of his yacht and blocking a shift away from the climate-destroying energy he’s deeply invested in?
Manchin’s state stands to benefit both from the economic and climate provisions in the Biden bill. As one of the poorest states in the union, West Virginia would get a boost from policies that expand access to education and healthcare, promote green jobs, and, yes, provide tax credits to working families. West Virginia, moreover, is one of the states most threatened by the deleterious impacts of global warming; as the New York Times reported Sunday, the state is more vulnerable to flooding than any other, with Manchin’s constituents not only physically unsafe due to worsening environmental catastrophe, but bearing an economic cost that undercut his objections to the price of Biden’s infrastructure bills. “Not having a credible policy in the U.S. makes it nearly impossible to negotiate real change at a global scale,” West Virginia State Representative Evan Hansen, a Democrat, told the Times. “What that means is that West Virginians are going to continue to face greater and greater impacts from climate change.”
Manchin is obviously not obligated to support everything his party wants, just because he’s a Democrat. But he does owe his colleagues—and his constituents—more honest arguments than he’s presented so far, as well as the same openness to compromise that progressives have shown throughout these negotiations. Democrats don’t need to get him to agree to everything for their bill to make a significant, positive impact: “While this will fall far short of what President Biden wants, it could still be the largest action Congress has ever taken on climate change,” former Barack Obama climate adviser Joseph Aldy told the Times, which reported that Manchin’s opposition has likely doomed a central provision of Biden’s plan to combat the global warming crisis. But the more control Manchin asserts over the legislation, the more it’ll look like the kind of half-measure struggling families and the melting planet can ill-afford.
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