How is it that two senators can kill bills that affect the whole country, and that most Americans say they favor?
After delaying the bill with nine months of phony negotiations that watered it down, West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin announced Dec. 19—on Fox News, no less—that he was a “no” on the Build Back Better Act (BBB), which killed it for the moment because of the 50-50 split between Democrats and Republicans in the Senate.
The bill would help working class families keep their heads above water and help slow down the climate crisis, among other things. Along with $555 billion in climate crisis provisions, the BBB act includes such things as Medicaid home care for the elderly and disabled; allowing Medicare to negotiate the prices of certain prescription drugs; having Medicaid help people with hearing loss; funding for affordable housing; and extending the child tax credit that has slashed child poverty. The majority of Americans polled say they want the bill to pass.
Manchin claimed he can’t vote for BBB because of its potential impact on the national debt and the economy, but he didn’t seem worried about the debt or the economy when four days earlier he and 87 other senators voted for hundreds of billions in military spending. Manchin, a coal millionaire, also said he couldn’t support BBB unless he could “explain it to the people of West Virginia,” but the bill includes a number of provisions that would help West Virginia coal miners, including miners with Black Lung. In fact, the president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), which has historically backed Manchin, issued a statement Dec. 20 calling on Manchin to support the bill. The BBB Act would give 95% of West Virginians a tax cut, and would help lift 43% of the state’s poor children out of poverty. What’s so hard to explain, Joe?
The UMWA also reiterated its support for the critically important voting rights legislation that is stalled in the Senate, calling on Manchin “and every other senator to be prepared to do whatever it takes” to get the bills passed. “Anti-democracy legislators and their allies are working every day to roll back the right to vote in America. Failure by the Senate to stand up to that is unacceptable and a dereliction of their duty to the Constitution,” the union said. Manchin and another right-leaning Democratic senator, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have kept the two voting rights bills bottled up in the Senate by refusing to consider modifying or eliminating the filibuster. Manchin also insisted on watering down one of the voting rights measures, and the rest of the corporate Democrats went along with this.
The Republicans, of course, have refused even to negotiate over BBB or voting rights.
The ugly picture that emerges is this: Manchin and Sinema are openly protecting the energy industry that opposes any shift to clean energy except on its own terms, and they are protecting the billionaires and corporations that would otherwise be taxed to pay for the BBB Act. He and Sinema are also aligning with the Republicans to hold up the voting rights bills so that the state voter suppression bills being passed around the country can proceed without hindrance. Manchin, whose term ends in 2025, knows he probably won’t be re-elected because he stabbed the American people in the back on BBB and voting rights, but he doesn’t care—there has long been a revolving door between the Senate and private industry, so he know if he takes care of the billionaires and corporations now, they’ll take care of him later. You can bet Sinema has made the same calculation.
Another ugly truth is that the so-called “moderate” (a.k.a. corporate) Democrats are effectively helping Manchin, Sinema and the Republicans carry out their agenda by offering only wimpy, passive resistance to it.
Because the billionaires are dictating their agenda, the corporate Democrats and Republicans can’t be relied on to do what the people need done, but there is a massive movement for progressive change that can be relied on. That movement is in the streets striking, organizing, defending democracy, running for office, and demanding that the government — regardless of party — meet the people’s needs. The movement must grow one-thousand fold so that the people can get money out of politics and take the government away from the corporations.
