Let's talk about Joe Manchin and his role in the failure of President Biden's BBB bill.
There's no question that Manchin played a role. He's a conservative Democrat who just wasn't up for spending $6 trillion or $3 trillion or whatever number was on the table at various times. He wanted something on the order of $1.5 trillion, and like many liberals I think it's a little dumb to pick a spending number out of a hat and try to fit programs into it, rather than the other way around. Nonetheless, that's the playing field we were on.
And Manchin was pretty clear about this. He had a written agreement with Chuck Schumer about the number. He told Biden this was the number. There was never really any doubt that this was his line in the sand.
So what programs did Manchin want to fit into that number? The answer is that he was flexible, but he had a few hot buttons. He wasn't happy with a no-strings-attached Child Tax Credit. He wanted to make sure climate change spending didn't hurt West Virginia coal miners. He wanted a few programs that were permanently funded rather than lots of programs that were only partially funded.
And it turns out that while he was fairly clear about this for months, White House staffers kept trying to go behind his back even after he felt like he'd reached a deal in principle. Whether Biden knew about this is still an open question.
Long story short, Manchin unquestionably wanted to cut BBB substantially. Beyond that, however, reporting over the past couple of months has persuaded me that he mostly acted decently in pursuit of that goal. You can disagree with him, as I do, but he didn't lie or deceive or backstab anyone. That happened more on the other side.
A lot of what happened was behind closed doors, so I can't say for sure that this is really how things went down. But it's my best guess at the moment. Manchin was a relatively reliable negotiating partner, and if we're going to give BBB another try this year he ought to be treated as one.
Manchin's latest bit of specious reasoning is that he opposed BBB because it didn't go through the regular committee process. Given that he didn't raise that issue at the time the bill would, in regular order, have gone to committee, I have to infer bad faith. Manchin, it appears, is determined to kill BBB and keeps coming up with one bad faith rationalization after another for doing so.
Correct. He needed to be roped and tied somehow and no one could manage it.
Yeah, his complaints were rotating and specious.
Manchin was a relatively reliable negotiating partner ...
Well, I would take issue with a few of those words, including "reliable," "negotiating," and "partner," but leaving that aside, and focusing on his representation as a WV Senator, he's been equally ineffective -- even counterproductive -- in that role as well.
He had nearly unlimited leverage to get a river of money diverted into a state that very much needs it, and what did he do? He posed and preened and mumbled and shuffled and dithered and weaseled and got ... exactly nothing for West Virginia. Nothing.
And puh-LEEZ don't fall for the "West Virginia coal miners" thing. The number of people in WV actually employed by the coal industry numbers fewer than 14,000, to which one arguably can add at least some of the 36,000 in various contractor roles -- at very most a total of fewer than 50,000, or less than 6% of the working-age population. By contrast, around 25% of the children in WV live in poverty, and 1 in 10 in extreme poverty. And the profits from the coal industry don't go to the miners or office staff; they go to the owners -- like Joe Manchin -- who themselves have worked to reduce employment in the industry by more than 90% over several decades.
Manchin is a borderline feudalist who cares little more for the average West Virginian than a medieval baron cared for his serfs. Negotiating partner my hillbilly ass.
👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
But those 14,000 include the Manchin family!
There are literally more jobs installing solar and clean energy in the state than miners,
The thing is, poll after poll showed that WV voters thought BBB was some combination of communism and witchcraft and wanted nothing to do with it and Manchin listened to that (as well as his donors).
A perception he could have done an enormous amount to counter -- unlike people in some other red states, WVns are typically happy to sacrifice ideological purity for practical benefits -- but which instead (not at all coincidentally imho) he did nothing to counter and everything to encourage.
Any man who publicly implies that the parents of West Virginia's children will rush to buy drugs with federal money, rather than use it for those children's needs (unless there is a work requirement, where there are not enough jobs), is disgraceful. How much of the supplement would then have been needed to pay for childcare?
Machin's right. Addicts will indeed use no-strings attached government money (or any money) to buy drugs before they buy food for their kids.
Where he's wrong is that this is a valid reason not to to extend the CRT, a measure that will significantly mitigate the national scandal that is child poverty in the United States. You don't fail to pass a measure that will help several tens of millions of American kids because there are a few hundred thousand the measure won't help.
Politicians never complain when businessmen waste their lavish tax breaks and subsidies on hookers and blow and drive their companies into the ground.
JEFFREY SKILLING DID NOTHING WRONG.
Hey, they’re job creators - sex workers and drug dealers gotta pay the rent, too.
If drug addicts are in a position to spend child tax credit money on drugs, the state they're in needs to look carefully at their child protection services. There's no way that serious drug addicts should be caring for children.
I tend to agree that Manchin doesn't really care about coal miners. If he did, he would have been working his tail off for years to bring OTHER industries to WV, knowing -- as he must -- that coal is on its way out no matter what he does. That's the problem: the coal industry has done everything in its power to keep WV workers dependent on their industry. What Manchin cares about far more is the coal mine OWNERS, who are best served by (a) perpetuating the ancient totem of the coal miner as a cultural icon, and (b) helping thwart any effort to bring competing industries, energy-related or not, into the state.
I believe that some states are trying programs to train former miners in coding, & Virginia hopes to put some to work manufacturing solar panels- both safer than mining. Some miners made "good money," but at what cost to their health?
How about a program for removing coal miners from the mines and treating them for the years of traumatizing abuse they've suffered being coal miners?
It was never about his supposed decency or his forthright negotiating, the sourness comes from his myopia, his failure of imagination, his disdain of the future.
Yet he DID express concern for the future of his 10 grandchildren. I doubt that they'll be left destitute, even if Manchin leaves it to their parents to provide.
He expresses little appreciation for the truly poor of his own state - already 25% funded through Washington?
Myopic concern...
Kevin, you blandly assert that Manchin made clear demands, and was backstabbed by White House staffers. You "it turns out" that's true, and say you've gleaned from "reports over the past couple of months" that the perfidy happened "more on the other side."
Can you be any more specific about where you learned this? It's at odds with the reporting I've been following. (Mainly from Josh Marshall and Kate Riga at TPM, as well as WaPo.)
To be a little blunter: Show your work. You're making assertions that fly in the face lefty "received wisdom." That's great, that's a good chunk of why I've followed your blogging for over a dozen years. But when you make those assertions, you usually back them up. Here you didn't. Put up or shut up.
this
The humble millionaire from WV does PR better than our president. Maybe Biden needs a houseboat for negiatations.
I’m skeptical of Kevin’s conclusion, also. Manchin’s reported objectives shifted from time to time - the spend was too much; this or that program should go; sunsetting programs was just to sneak them by, they should be costed in perpetuity or dropped. The total-price argument didn’t make sense after the initial cuts by the progressives - no matter how small the bill, Manchin would have had to run on “I cut the excess out of the bill” against his Republican opponents’, “The whole bill is pork and graft, I would have killed it!”
Amen. I was going to say the same thing, but you did it so well, I'm just going to say Amen,
100 percent!
Exactly. We know what Manchin's staffers have said to the press (anonymously) . We haven't got the vaguest idea what Manchin was actually willing to sign up for because he never made any kind of public proposal. That's what you do if you are an honest and reliable negotiator.
Biden's staffers also told him to get into the "covid vaccination" debate despite not wanting to. These staffers should be fired.
BBB is coming back. Biden needs to direct run talks. Manchin needs to.understand his name will be attached, thrive off that than fear.
Rich, coming from the guy who kept assuring us on the basis of his supposed "insider knowledge" that the deal was done and all that remained to be decided was the timing of the announcement.
Please don't feed the racist, antisemitic semi-literate troll. It only leaves its droppings to get attention.
The most accurate thing that Kevin wrote is that “A lot of what happened was behind closed doors, so I can't say for sure that this is really how things went down.” There has been a lot of spin by all sides and Kevin seems to be giving more credence to the accounts by Joe Manchin’s people and the people who didn’t want BBB to pass. I always listen to the Josh Marshall Podcast from TPM. I’ve basically been getting an update on Manchin every week for almost a year. There are a few things I think I can say with some certainty:
1.) Joe Manchin is not a details guy. He doesn’t make up new programs. He doesn’t negotiate low level rules. He just throws out various general ideas and pushes those. They could be important. They could be insignificant. He doesn’t really care how important they are. He’d be just as happy pushing a bill that does nothing as one that does a lot.
2.) Joe Manchin likes attention. In some ways he is a celebrity and he likes that. Of course, some parts of being a celebrity are bad and he gripes about those. But he likes being where he is more than he likes actually getting things done.
3.) As close as I can tell, Joe Manchin never had a deal in principle. The way most negotiating works is you get an agreement on something, put it in a sort of final form, and then move on to the next thing. This never happened with Manchin. Everything was always on the table. People would come to him with proposals and sometimes he’d say he would support that. Other times he’d say he wouldn’t support it. But much of the time he’d say he wouldn’t support something, but encourage the people to try again. So nothing was really set in stone.
And because nothing was really set in stone, everything was negotiable. Manchin might like something that he was presented with, but then that would mean that something else would have to be dropped. Which means someone else would have to rework the original stuff and nothing was ever really agreed on. Every part of the bill was still being negotiated. This was all because of Manchin.
Now, I personally don’t think Manchin was trying to sabotage the bill. I think that if the Dems in the Senate were better negotiators they could have gotten an agreement. But that is different than saying Manchin is a reliable negotiating partner. Basically, Manchin would wake up every day and put a finger to the wind to see which way it was blowing and then make various statements. What he said was never part of some ideology. Nor some deeply held principle. It was just what he felt that day. Or what he thought would get some good press.
Does Manchin want to help the many, many poor people of West Virginia? I have no idea. I remember when Hillary proposed a $30 Billion program to build clean energy and other industries in Appalachia to replace coal mining - a proposal that WV voters rejected. Manchin has no similar ideas. He judges that the people of WV don’t want anything new, so he feels no pressure to give them anything new. At least that is the impression he gives.
As for the coal miners, I’m sure Kevin saw the tweet from the Coal Miners Union saying that they wanted Manchin to pass BBB because it included things that would help coal miners transition to the future economy. So no, he didn’t scuttle the bill because he thought it would hurt coal miners. But exactly why he did still defies explanation. Everyone could talk for days and declare that Manchin was evil or what not and no one would be any closer to the truth. We just don’t know.
I do realize that many people (including me) just skip over long posts, but I really wanted to say this. This isn't really an opinion piece by Kevin. It's much more of a research piece and I think Kevin has completely misread which sources are reliable.
i mostly agree with all of this, but also think it may still be a bit too kind to manchin. there's no way to know his motivations, but based on everything I've seen i think he was always out to block any BBB bill.
Manchin has supported all the judges Biden proposes. He’s helped pass various Democratic stuff in the Senate. That is why I give him the benefit of the doubt, even if I would not describe him as a reliable negotiating partner. But I freely admit I could be wrong.
Well, if Manchin refuses to back joebiden's Supremes pick after voting for all three of El Jefe's, he really will have not a leg to stand on as someone who sees past partisanship.
If you want a cause for Manchin's endless "negotiation," look no further than your #2. If they somehow came to a resolution, his "show" would end abruptly and, more to the point, he would have to run for reelection on the results. Far better for him to run on his status as the center of attention in Washington.
all the reporting i've seen, along with public statements from manchin and those he was negotiating with, lead me to the exact opposite conclusions.
Just wanted to add that I'm totally with all the arguments that Joe Manchin was a bad-faith actor in this whole scenario.
To the many good points above, I'd add another one which I haven't seen mentioned yet: Remember when Manchinema promised, promised, I tells ya, that they weren't negotiating in bad faith when they demenaded that BIL be passed before considering the BBB? And that, honest, they would do everything they could to make sure it passed?
ISTR numerous people saying at the time that these two were so shamelessly lying that they practically defined bad faith ... Any guesses as to who was closer to the mark? Those worthies? Or Kevin Drum?
Good point!
I feel like a lot of Kevin's posts lately have followed the "lefties are clearly missing something" formula, and I'm usually pretty open to the idea. But yea, he's out to lunch on this one. 😛
Manchin broke off the "bipartisan" infrastructure piece (somehow with Republican support... gee, I wonder what they were promised?) and got that passed, and then never had any intention of allowing the rest. It's been plain as day that he's been jerking the entire Dem caucus around.
What were they promised? That's easy: He promised to block BBB in return for their 'bipartisan' support of the BIL.
The only way Manchin supports anything D's want is if either:
(a) WV voters want the bill to pass (which almost never happens as to something portrayed as a D bill, even if they like what's in it); or
(b) it's something that gets no "adverse" publicity that will blow-back on him (i.e., anything high profile is out because Fox will drill into his constituents that if D's get this it's because of Manchin's cooperation).
BBB fits through neither teeny-weeny exception.
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The tell that this is clickbait (or just a really stupid take) from Drum is the notion that Manchin gives a fig about coal miners. No doubt that Manchin cares about coal mining owners, like himself, but actual coal miners...puleez! Hell, the coal mining unions were not happy with Manchin's machinations. And as others have pointed out here, there aren't enough coal miners or even coal miner adjacent workers to matter, even in WV.
He clearly never negotiated in good faith. But, hey, Kevin gets to advance the message, that I keep seeing more of, that Biden's staff is off the reservation.
Wow.
Lock Manchin and Putin in a room together. Let them negotiate about everything until one croaks.
Manchin reminds me of a union leader I once had to negotiate with, named Norm Gallagher. Norm would never, ever make concrete, positive demands. He'd take direct action and invite employers to make offers, which he would reject. Eventually, other unions involved in the dispute would come to an agreement. Gallagher would end his direct action without agreeing to anything and tell his members they'd been sold out by the other union officials.
Far from being a "relatively reliable negotiating partner", Manchin positioned himself to play the role of moderate-centrist-being badgered-by-progressives. He had no ideas of his own; he just kept rejecting compromise suggestions as unacceptable. A good faith negotiator would have sat down with Sinema and devised a proposal which both were committed to supporting. He did no such thing. He reportedly told Bernie Sanders he'd be happy if there was nothing in the BBB bill, which was evidently the truth.
The day Pelosi broke her promise to pass two bills in tandem, commenters at Lawyers Guns & Money were in general agreement that the BBB was dead. Manchin and Sinema had no incentive to vote for it, once they had their precious "bipartisan" bill passed. They were right.
Indeed they were. As were literally _millions_ of commentors elsewhere who were saying the exact same thing.
So, was that a case of 'one bill or no bills' ?
And fancy having to negotiate with old Gangster Norm.
You're talking counterfacturals. If you're going that way, you can't discount the possiblity that Pelosi and/or Biden wasn't in on the scam as well. Don't forget that Obama screwed his own people over on the ACA as well; remember 'the public option is not off the table'?
"A good faith negotiator would have sat down with Sinema and devised a proposal which both were committed to supporting."
In fairness to Manchin: Sinema is genuinely incapable of such an action; she is so self centered it makes her stupid beyond belief. Which is why sh is in trouble with the AZ Democratic party now. If Manchin had agreed to a bill there was a chance she could have been bullied into supporting it (she definitely does not care about policy details) rather than standing out all alone.
Manchin can claim to have acted rationally (though not very intelligently if you consider the position of the coal miner unions); Sinema doesn't know "rational" when it hits hr on the head.
Kevin, have you jumped the shark, or fallen under the bus, or maybe you were standing too close to the exhaust pipe of a coal boiler ?
Your writing has been growing less and less well-informed. You seemed to understand that Fox News was poisoning our politics, but then you insist that liberals have to be nicer in their arguments.
This one is so far off the rails, where were you all summer ?? Every week, almost every day, a new objection, a new demand, never a baseline from which reasonable people could begin negotiations.
I've enjoyed you as a nice break from the silly contrarianism that infects even the best of our more liberal news aggregators. You do indulge in silly contrarianism sometimes, but at least you do it in a calm voice.
But if you're going to be this ridiculous about a process in which Manchin demonstrated how to be the model of a negotiator-trying-to-destroy-the negotiations-he-is-supposedly-participating- in, I can't find much reason to come here any more.
Well if you do find somewhere else to go instead, you will post here and tell us all, yes ?
"I think it's a little dumb to pick a spending number out of a hat and try to fit programs into it, rather than the other way around."
That's funny, because I reckon that's exactly how everybody but the very rich has to function all of the time.
And even the very rich can’t print money. But the Federal government can.
But the rich can get the Fed to print money for them, as when Biden retained Trump's tax cuts for the rich.
And it turns out that while he was fairly clear about this for months, White House staffers kept trying to go behind his back even after he felt like he'd reached a deal in principle. Whether Biden knew about this is still an open question.
Kevin: A couple weeks ago Yglesias wrote.a piece on his Substack claiming—pretty convincingly as I recall, although I don't remember the details—that it's mostly Chuck Schumer who is to blame for the bill's demise.
Per Yglesias, Schumer was worried about a primary challenge from AOC, and didn't want to be blamed for an insufficiently progressive piece of legislation. So, he basically sabotaged the process.
Here's the non-paywalled piece:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/chuck-schumer-should-call-the-baileys
So he’d prefer to get primaried for not getting any bill at all? Sure, that will bring the progressives back into Chuck’s camp.
So he’d prefer to get primaried for not getting any bill at all?
Schumer would prefer that no bill pass than an insufficiently (ie, no GND) progressive bill pass that progressives can "blame" him for, yes,* and that might fuel the fire for a primary challenge.
You'll note the strategy might well be working. Machin's catching a lot of lefty ire. Schumer? Not so much.
*AOC is an obviously ambitious political leader who has long been rumored to be interested in moving up the ladder (why shouldn't she?) so, that part, at least, seems plausible. It's hard to imagine Schumer wouldn't be vulnerable to a challenge from the left if he's not careful. Yglesias's point is that Schumer has done a shitty job because it's his responsibility as majority leader to take the heat when the contents of a bill (inevitably) don't please everyone, even if, yes, you sometimes have to take a moderate bit of risk to get bills to your president's desk.
Yglesias is an idiot.
Maybe he's an idiot. Maybe not. But the piece cites some pretty credible evidence that Schumer's office engaged in lack-of-good-faith miscommunication as it "tried" to broker an agreement between the White House and Joe Manchin.
It's just the idea she would primary Schumer is so patently absurd, it's the kind of sophomoric drama-mongering you'd hear from some quack on Fox.
Taking on your own party's Senate Majority Leader doesn't happen every day, sure, but I don't think it's remotely "absurd." AOC got her current job by primarying an incumbent, centrist NYC Democrat of long tenure. And in any event Chuck Schumer hasn't gotten where he's at by being blasé about potential challenges.
He's the Majority Leader, and if you aim at the king you have to kill him. If she doesn't half the caucus hates her for undermining him, if she does half the caucus hates her for killing him.
She won't be senior enough for a leadership position for years and no one will trust her. She'd get few committee assignments, and none that can help her, and never a chairmanship. What does she do then?
It's easier to picture her primarying Kirsten Gillibrand, but I can't really imagine that, either. Because women will hold a grudge and who needs that?
I can picture her running for governor, though governor of New York is a pretty thankless job, because it would shore up her executive credentials for when she runs for president.
Is the impression I have of it.
Yglesias isn't an idiot and he generally explains his reasoning. And he's hyperarticulate. But one should never mistake erudition for wisdom. Yglesias is sometimes wrong. And sometimes, he admits it.
I followed him since he started blogging as a Harvard undergrad, but when he went behind a paywall, I decided he wasn't worth it.
'Hyperarticulate'? Yglesias? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
This strains credulity. Why would Manchin let the blame fall on him, unless he thought that being the guy who killed BBB would be politically beneficial to himself in WV? And if that’s what he’s thinking, then he would of course make sure the bill failed. In Yglesias’ fairytale, Manchin wants a bill, presumably thinking he can run successfully on a reduced BBB, but then says nothing when the bill fails and he is blamed. And progressives, who would have taken revenge on Schumer for not getting enough, give him a pass for getting nothing at all. Yeah, right.
And progressives, who would have taken revenge on Schumer for not getting enough, give him a pass for getting nothing at all.
Well, you're giving Schumer a pass for "getting nothing done at all" so it doesn't seem a stretch! I mean, he is the Senate majority leader, and it's his chamber and not Pelosi's that ultimately couldn't provide the votes. So surely he gets some blame, right? (But he seems to have gotten none.) I mean, even if you don't buy the Machiavellian narrative, Schumer hardly comes out of this looking like Lyndon Johnson, so at minimum we'd expect a modicum of questioning with respect to his competence at his core responsibility (coraling votes). I've seen very little to none of that.
Why would Manchin let the blame fall on him,
I'm not sure Manchin was aware he got screwed by Schumer on this, but in any event you can likely get better answers than I can provide by going to the source (it's not-paywalled) if you're so inclined.
No I can’t get any better answers from Yglesias; he can’t even be consistent with himself. At first he describes Schumer’s signature on the letter as simply acknowledging Manchin’s ask, as indeed it appears to be. Later he describes it as Schumer acquiescing to every one of Manchin’s demands, which it clearly is not. (Which would have been meaningless anyway without the acquiescence of 48 other Senators.) After that MY goes on to make unwarranted assumptions about how easily a bill dictated by Manchin and Sinema alone could have passed the Senate and House, reading the minds of a half-dozen Senators along the way. I don’t normally read MY. Nothing in that piece inclines me to do otherwise.
Yeah, Yglesias. Not the sharpest nor the most honest player by any means. He's better than Greenwald, but not by much.
"He had nearly unlimited leverage to get a river of money diverted into a state that very much needs it, and what did he do? He posed and preened and mumbled and shuffled and dithered and weaseled and got ... exactly nothing for West Virginia. Nothing."
Unfortunately this not Bobby Byrd we're dealing with here even though Machin occupies his seat. Otherwise this would have been done a long time ago. I heard a story that he has his aides tell him every day what the national debt is at that particular moment. Yeah, he's that kind of fellow.
I think as he was coming up politically in the 1990s he figured the old West Virginia economic model of coal mining and Byrd and Rockefeller showering the state with money from public and private grants not a feasible strategy for economic development. I mean back then , the budget was balanced, there was a surplus for the first time in a long time. I think he viewed the Democrats as the party of Clintonian fiscal responsibility and I think if you asked him who his favorite Dem is it's probably Bill Clinton and he tries to style himself in that manner.
The bottom line is exactly the way Digby described it: Manchin never wanted the bill to pass. Not even on his terms. He sees it as a deficit buster (even though we're long beyond that point) is unecessary due to higher inflation and any other austerity argument you can fathom. So he has been dragging this out or coming with new conditions every time a deal seems within reach so he can look both reasonable, seemingly trying to work out something while putting the bill to sleep because in the end he's against the while concept of it.
That's bad, of course.
But what's far, far worse is that he wouldn't cop to it.
"He wasn't happy with a no-strings-attached Child Tax Credit"
I've never understood the politics around this. Isn't helping middle class families considered political gold? Who is the constituency for opposing this?
What proved to me that this whole piece is (sorry for the language) bullshit was the blame being assigned to (luckily anonymous) "Biden staffers".
What is more plausible, that some staffers killed the bill by altering it on their own or that Manchin killed it but by dragging out the negotiations without having to vote against it on the floor?
I for one have no doubt about that.
What I'd like to know is if either Manchin or Sinema (especially her) would have had the cojones to tank the bill in this way if either had had to act alone.