Will the Real Joe Manchin Please Stand Up?

A s the debate over the Democratic Party’s ever-preposterous spending plans has waxed and waned, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a key player in the process, has developed an increasingly infuriating habit of speaking in one way and acting in quite another. At some point, Manchin will have a decision to make: Is he the plucky guy depicted in his press releases, or is he a garden-variety go-along-get-alonger who talks a good game in a gaggle but lacks the spine and inclination to follow through on his own rhetoric?

If one were to focus solely on Manchin’s predetermined pronouncements, one would have to conclude not only that he was as appalled by Congress’s “fiscal insanity” as the most rock-ribbed among America’s budget hawks, but that he was the last man left in the Senate who cared about regular order. And yet, if one reads reports of what Manchin has actually done, he is quite clearly neither of those things. I will not re-rehearse here the case that, when it comes down to brass tacks, Senator Joe Manchin is only pretending to be a fiscal conservative upon whose weary shoulders sits the full weight of our “brutal fiscal reality.” Instead, I will offer a second, but related, observation: that, despite his wholesome words, Senator Manchin does not seem to care much about stopping bad behavior in the U.S. Senate.

Manchin makes a great song and dance out of his desire to impose order, rationality, and bipartisan comity on the lawmaking process, but, for nearly six months now, he has happily indulged precisely the sort of behavior that he claims loudly to disdain. In an admirable Wall Street Journal piece last month, Manchin lamented that “in 2017, my Republican friends used the privileged legislative procedure of budget reconciliation to rush through a partisan tax bill” and implied that no such thing would be allowed to happen on his watch. Then, he wrote, “Democrats rightfully criticized this budgetary tactic. Now, my Democratic friends want to use this same budgetary tactic to push through sweeping legislation to make ‘historic investments.’” “Respectfully,” he concluded, “it was wrong when the Republicans did it, and it is wrong now.”

Which, if true, raises an important question: Namely, what on earth is Manchin doing indulging this process in the first place? Unless I’ve missed something, the Democrats are trying to use exactly the same “budgetary tactic” here — what Manchin calls the “privileged legislative procedure of budget reconciliation” — in order to push through a “partisan” bill that is full of their long-held priorities. If Manchin were out for revenge against the Republicans, this behavior would make sense. Instead, he has insisted that “it was wrong when the Republicans did it, and it is wrong now.” Explaining his vote to proceed with the package in September, Manchin said he did not want to be “the fly in the ointment.” But, if that ointment is “wrong,” as Manchin has said it is, then why not?

Other statements by Manchin ring hollow, too. In the same piece in the Journal, Manchin suggested that “establishing an artificial $3.5 trillion spending number and then reverse-engineering the partisan social priorities that should be funded isn’t how you make good policy.” But this is exactly how he himself is proceeding, albeit with a smaller “artificial number” in play. Earlier in the summer, Manchin cosigned a memorandum of understanding with Chuck Schumer in which the very first line reads, “Topline: $1.5 Trillion,” and, since then, he has been “reverse-engineering” the process to fit into it. Every day, with Senator Manchin’s help, the Democrats throw spaghetti at the wall in a desperate attempt to do something — anything! — that can get 50 votes, and, rather than explain that this is a horrible way to make law, Manchin acquiesces. Why?

At some level, Manchin seems to understand that there is no need for a bill at all and that the mad dash we’re currently watching is absurd. He told Bernie Sanders last week that he’d be happy with spending “zero”; he frequently conveys to journalists that the bill is going to “take time”; he has on more than one occasion suggested a six-month-long “strategic pause”; and he has written bluntly that “while some have suggested this reconciliation legislation must be passed now, I believe that making budgetary decisions under artificial political deadlines never leads to good policy or sound decisions.” In practice, though, he seems quite happy to be rushed along by his caucus. Yesterday, Manchin said that the Democrats could “absolutely” come to a deal by . . . well, today — even though, as has been widely noted, the Democratic Party is not only unable to agree on anything much at all, but has a pair of sticking-point senators whose red lines seem to be mutually exclusive. This afternoon, he backtracked, explaining that his party is “not going to do everything today” before Joe Biden leaves for Rome. Which is true, of course, but which obfuscates the bigger question: Why is he trying to?

The answer? Depends on which Joe Manchin you ask.