The Squad was right to vote against infrastructure bill Part 2: Manchin snubs constituents [View all]

[wellst0nev0ter]

The Washington Post published an infuriating article today:

As Democrats in Washington scrambled on Wednesday to prevent President Biden’s $2 trillion spending package from derailing, a group of West Virginia parents gathered on a video call as part of a last-minute effort to turn up the heat on one of their senators, Democrat Joe Manchin III.

(snip)

On Wednesday’s video call, 11 West Virginia mothers dialed in and waited for a Manchin aide to join them. They aimed to impress upon him how the expanded monthly child tax credit, championed by Biden and most Democrats in Congress and included in the spending bill, had changed their lives.

As they waited, they chatted about how the tax credit had helped them all in the past several months to purchase necessities like food, said Amy Jo Hutchison, a West Virginia organizer who had set up the call. Some of the women dialed in while picking up kids from child care.

(snip)

But less than 20 minutes before the call was supposed to start, the Manchin aide emailed to apologize and ask to reschedule for Thursday, Hutchison said.

“Senator Manchin prides himself on having an open-door policy and meeting with all West Virginians. Unfortunately, sometimes the Senate schedule or other pressing matters require staff to reschedule meetings,” Sam Runyon, a spokeswoman for Manchin, said in a statement on Wednesday night. “In this case, as in most cases, the meeting was immediately rescheduled for [Thursday] afternoon and the staffer provided his phone number to anyone that was unable to participate in the call.”

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/12/16/manchin-child-tax-credit

The only real leverage we had over Manchinema is holding the BIF until we had firm commitments on BBB. By summer and fall, Manchin was way too invested in BIF to abandon the bill: he even cut campaign commercials about what he was delivering for West Virginians.

BIF was Sinema's pet project to prove that the bipartisanship pony worked. She had too much riding on it to let it fail.

Those who called for immediately passing BIF independent of BBB are disastrously incapable of dealmaking. You do NOT give holdouts the line-item veto pen to craft their ideal package and hope for the best.

You treat Manchinema the way you treat the other 48 votes: they get their pound of flesh, and you make them concede on a bill that is less than what they want, but is what they can swallow.

This is what happened with the Rescue Plan and I am forever dumbstruck that the same approach was not repeated for BBB.

If Manchinema continues to resist, put the bill on the floor, dare them to vote against the bill and tank Biden's entire agenda, and remind them that they will become eternal pariahs of the Democratic Party.

Manchin is not going to switch parties because that would spell the immediate end of his political career: no trumpanzee will vote for someone who voted to convict 45 twice.

Sinema is all but disowned by the Arizona Democratic party, and if she has any survival instincts, she will fall in line.

Rolling over and saying "welp, we tried, vote harder" is not going to win you elections. Doing something and actually fighting for your voters brings you victory.