Joe Manchin. /
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He’s a Democrat, but he backed 74% of Trump’s initiatives. At 74, he has held the government of Joe Biden hostage by being in possession of the vote on which any legislation depends
The founding fathers wanted the US Senate to have a hundred seats. Voters divided it solomonically 50-50 for each party in the last election. And ever since, West Virginia has made Joe Manchin the man who decides the fate of whatever legislation is voted on. The rest of the country, of course, is not very happy.
From ‘Almost Heaven’, the ship in which he lives anchored in the Potomac River, Manchin contemplates every morning the skyline of Washington, with the Capitol and the Obelisk looming through the clouds. The view must be so impressive that one day Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowsky, in full ecstasy and, perhaps, helped by the ethyl elixirs with which Manchin relaxes her guests, surprised by singing a cappella a ‘God Bless America’ that she made history.
What makes Joe Manchin the most requested is not his ability to seat rival senators like Ted Cruz and Tom Harkin over a few beers. Not even the exclusivity of its nautical evenings, to which all of Washington wants to be invited, but the ephemeral margin of the Democratic majority, which does not allow the party to lose a single vote. And, above all, the conservative character of the West Virginia senator who, despite having Kennedy and Carter in his office, frequently votes with the opposition. He is against abortion and in favor of the death penalty, defends weapons, invests in the polluting coal industry, authorized Trump’s wall and almost became his Secretary of Energy.
Those who say that Manchin is not a Democrat are wrong. They fall into the false paradigm of dividing the right and the left between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, when among the latter even Barack Obama admired Reagan. Times are changing and there is less and less political space for half measures. Joe Manchin is one of those endangered specimens capable of voting 74% of the time in favor of Trump’s laws, as he presumes on his website, without losing the respect of his co-religionists. The Blue Dogs, those fiscally conservative Democratic deputies to whom a certain social progressivism is supposed, have in the House of Representatives 19 members of 435, but without them the formation would be lost (the majority of the party in the government is for only eight seats) , because he would not be able to win in Deep America. He has to spin very fine and not lose Manchin.
The senator boasts that in his first month in office he received more calls from Biden than in the eight years from Obama, who only called him three times. The current president even invited him to breakfast last Sunday at his home in Delaware, along with Senate leader Chuck Schumer -another regular on his ship-, to settle the scope of the infrastructure law that will define his presidency. The ambitious plan proposes to invest 3.5 billion dollars in the future of the country to renovate equipment, expand medical coverage, include dental and ophthalmological assistance, finance public universities, promote clean energy, subsidize electric vehicles, set up a large network of charging stations, offer free preschool to all children, pay three months of sick leave, build social housing, offer tax deductions for each child and finance the dependency of the elderly, among other dreams of the welfare state, absent in the United States.
For that the party does not need a single opposition vote, because it plans to approve it through a budget resource that only requires a simple majority, but here comes Joe Manchin, with his smudged pen to cross out everything he does not like. The senator has forced his co-religionists to choose, because he does not intend to approve more than 1.5 or 2 trillion dollars and, of course, nothing that will put the coal industry in trouble.
Creator of coal factories
The man of humble origins who, before diving into the family’s political tradition and becoming governor, sold carpets and owned a car workshop, has amassed more than $ 4.5 million from coal factories created by him since the 1980s. same. Like Trump, he put them in a “blind” trust to avoid “a conflict of interest,” and gave the address to his son of the same name. According to The Intercept, his shares in Energysystems are valued between $ 1 million and $ 5 million.
Only so far this year the senator, who still has three more to go before re-election, has received donations from the oil industry for 40,000 dollars, as well as other polluting interests that have allowed him to close the month of September with 5.4 million dollars in cash. Manchin has been the main defender of the mining industry in the Senate, where he has vetoed regulations that would have prevented accidents, polluting emissions and toxic derivatives, in addition to reducing the price of energy. “Since coal is the main source of mercury emissions, every time you eat fish you put mercury in your body thanks to it,” environmental professor Avner Vengosh explained to The Intercept.
Manchin is not only God in Washington. Every time he looks at the sky from the railing of his boat, he decides what rains in the rest of the world and even what transforms our bodies. And unless the Almighty decides that at 74 he has done enough, John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home’ will not take him down the rural roads of West Virginia, but through the arteries of the planet.
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