United States: Joe Manchin, this influential Democrat who refuses to vote for Biden's reforms

In the halls of Congress, his colleagues call him “Your Highness”. At 73, Joe Manchin has become one of Washington’s most powerful politicians, because all of Joe Biden’s great reforms depend on his goodwill. Democrats hold such a narrow majority in the Senate that they cannot afford any defection. This took advantage of the senator from West Virginia, one of the most conservative members of Joe Biden’s party, to impose his views on the administration.

This pro-charcoal, anti-abortion and anti-Paris climate agreement recently announced its opposition to the electoral reform project. This law, yet deemed crucial by Democrats to protect democracy, would impose national rules on voting procedures, limit the redistribution of constituencies and cap campaign financing. Given the Republicans’ unanimous hostility, it has little chance of being passed as it is without the support of the entire Democratic camp.

According to the senator, the text would be too partisan. He dreams, he repeats everywhere, of returning to a Senate where the two camps would debate in a civil manner and find compromises. “We cannot continue to divide and distance ourselves from each other. We have to work together,” he told CNN. A sweet utopia, annoy his colleagues. Under Barack Obama, Joe Manchin himself failed to find common ground with the conservatives on immigration and the carrying of arms, they recall.

Naive or calculating?

Today the Republican Party is more determined than ever to filibuster and block Joe Biden’s program. What does it matter! Joe Manchin proclaims it in all tones: he will vote in favor of a reform only if it is supported, too, by the Republicans. Naivety? Political calculation intended to please the voters of his state, more conservative than the average of the Democrats? Either way, this stark stance threatens to torpedo Joe Biden’s big plans, from immigration to climate change, universal kindergarten and infrastructure.

Democrats hoped to convince him to vote for the abolition of filibuster, a tactic of obstruction as old as the American Constitution (1787), which allows to delay indefinitely the passage of a bill until a “super majority” of 60 votes in the Senate (which has 100 elected) n is not reached. The left wing of the Democratic Party is pushing for the abolition of this practice, which would allow the reforms to be voted by a simple majority (50 votes plus one). But Joe Manchin categorically refuses to “weaken or eliminate” the filibuster for fear of harming the functioning of the Senate. In recent days, he has been active behind the scenes to amend electoral reform to his liking and to try to find cooperative Republicans. Praying that the left wing doesn’t rebel.

“Romantic idea”

For the increasingly exasperated Democrats, it’s a shame that West Virginia – one of the smallest, whitest, and poorest states in the country – dictates US policy. “By his obstruction, Joe Manchin is doing the job of the Republican Party,” protested Jamaal Bowman, representative of New York. Her colleague Alexandria Ocasio Cortez laughs at this “romantic idea” of a bipartisan Senate, which “simply no longer exists”. Even President Biden launched a spade against Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, senator from Arizona, “two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends”.

But he knows he has little means of pressure. Joe Manchin isn’t really likely to suffer electorally from his opposition to Biden’s ambitious reforms in this ultra-conservative state, where Donald Trump won by 39 points. “The party needs him and his seat more than the party needs,” sums up Hans Noel, a professor of political science at Georgetown University. Manchin is both a thorn and a “gift for the Democratic Party,” he continues. For without him, West Virginia would surely have elected a Republican senator and thus deprived Democrats of a majority in the Senate.

L’application L’Express

To follow the analysis and decryption wherever you are

–

Download the app

–

For the moment, the order of the Party hierarchs is to avoid attacking him too violently. History not to hold him up or, worse, to encourage him to go into the opposition, which would make them lose control of the Senate. It happened in 2001 – the other way around. Jim Jeffords, who was a Republican senator from Vermont, had abandoned his party and tipped the Senate into the Democratic camp.