 | | Senator Joe Manchin has long enjoyed the national spotlight.Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times |
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For months, it has been one of the biggest questions in Washington: What does Senator Joe Manchin want? |
Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, fashions himself as an old-school centrist dealmaker, the sort of nearly extinct congressional species who hashes out deals over the bootleg moonshine he keeps stocked in unmarked Mason jars in his Senate office. |
Like nearly all other senators who first served as a governor, he often bemoans the fact that he's no longer a chief executive, with a security detail and the ability to make things happen on command. He created a former governors' caucus in the Senate for like-minded colleagues and has often said his best day as a senator was worse than his worst day as governor. |
Manchin, who was a quarterback at West Virginia University before injuries derailed his athletic career, enjoys the national spotlight and seeming nonstop attention from reporters, fellow senators and presidents too much to have sought a return to the Statehouse in Charleston. |
The combination of his desire to make deals, create action and remain the center of political attention culminated over the weekend when he shocked Democrats, the White House and journalists with his announcement — on "Fox News Sunday" — that he would not support President Biden's social policy agenda, a $2.2 trillion spending bill known as the Build Back Better Act that has served as the primary vehicle for his party's agenda for 2021 and 2022. |
Like his centrist Democratic colleague Kyrsten Sinema, who has also built a carefully crafted image as a senator who wants to get things done, Manchin finds himself at the center of competing priorities. He is the primary roadblock to the centerpiece of Biden's domestic agenda, but as the deciding vote in a 50-50 Senate he is also the central figure with the power to create action. |
As long as that's the case, an unending cascade of attention will follow from the White House, fellow congressional negotiators and reporters, who for weeks have trailed Manchin around the Capitol like a pack of hungry dogs. |
"Joe Manchin is always up for discussing ways to get to 'yes' and how to make a bill better," Kott told me. "It's who he is. He's a governor at heart. It's how he negotiated with the State Legislature in West Virginia. I don't know what the status of this bill is, but I know that Joe Manchin is always open to negotiations in honest and straightforward ways." |
So what, I asked, does that mean for the status of the Build Back Better legislation? What would Manchin agree to? |
"He has told everybody what he wants," Kott said. "Joe Manchin is pretty upfront and honest about what he wants, and he's been saying it for six months." |
Indeed, unlike Sinema, who went silent before taking a public victory lap after Biden signed the infrastructure bill last month, Manchin is a regular talker in the Senate hallways and a fixture on the Sunday talk shows. |
There, Manchin lamented the very public pressure campaign to get him to agree to the social policy legislation and laid out in some detail why he remained opposed to it. He's concerned about the national debt and spending, the senator said, and wants benefits like the federal child tax credit targeted to the poor and the middle class, rather than to all Americans. |
(It is worth noting that proponents of the tax credit for all say inserting an income cap will mean that the benefit won't go to as many poor people as need it, and that work requirements would by their nature cut out millions of those in poverty who could otherwise be helped.) |
Manchin said that pressure campaigns hadn't worked on him, and that he wouldn't change his mind. |
"They figured, surely to God we can move one person, surely we can badger and beat one person up," he told Kercheval. "Surely we can get enough protesters to make that person uncomfortable enough that they'll say, 'Well, I'll just vote for anything, just quit.' Well, guess what? I'm from West Virginia." |
Both Senator Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, and Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, offered a sunny outlook, saying that they didn't believe negotiations with Manchin were over. The White House, despite an extraordinary statement on Sunday that effectively called Manchin a liar, didn't pull the plug, either. "Senator Manchin and I are going to get something done," Biden said Tuesday. |
I asked Kott if there was any reason to believe that there could be a future for Build Back Better. His answer seemed to be one of education — both for Democrats trying to understand what Manchin wants and for Manchin himself, if he does hope to be the guy who can make a deal, and a big one at that. |
"I don't ever say anything is dead in Washington," Kott said. "But when he says, 'I can't go home and I can't explain this to West Virginia,' that's a serious line from him. He means that." |
 | | The House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 has issued a subpoena to Phil Waldron.Reuters |
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A retired colonel's unlikely role in pushing baseless election claims |
A few days after President Biden's inauguration put to rest one of the most chaotic transitions in U.S. history, a former Army colonel with a background in information warfare appeared on a Christian conservative podcast and offered a detailed account of his monthslong effort to challenge the validity of the 2020 vote count. |
In a pleasant Texas drawl, the former officer, Phil Waldron, told the hosts a story that was almost inconceivable: how a cabal of bad actors, including Chinese Communist officials, international shell companies and the financier George Soros, had quietly conspired to hack into U.S. voting machines in a "globalist/socialist" plot to steal the election. |
In normal times, a tale like that — full of wild and baseless claims — might have been dismissed as the overheated rantings of a conspiracy theorist. But the postelection period was not normal, providing all sorts of fringe players an opportunity to find an audience in the White House. |
Waldron stands as a case study. Working in conjunction with allies of President Donald Trump like Rudolph Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas, a member of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus — and in tandem with others like Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump's first national security adviser and a retired lieutenant general — Waldron managed to get a hearing for elements of his story in the very center of power in Washington. |
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