When the balance of political parties is split down-the-middle, the fulcrum at the center of the see-saw can teeter-or-totter on one guy named Joe
One year of ‘President Manchin’: For the Democratic agenda, all roads go through West Virginia
"They wait for Joe. And while they wait, they wonder. “His entourage vanished,” says a reporter.
“Maybe they snuck out the back,” says a photographer.
It’s a Tuesday in early December. Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), the Flowbee-haired centrist whose vote in the evenly divided Senate could make or break any given deal, had been spotted ducking into Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer’s office at exactly 11:06 a.m. That’s a conspicuous time and place for a private tête-à-tête — just before the Senate’s Tuesday lunches, when the Capitol Hill press would swarm the corridors in search of scooplets about the fate of Democrats’ social spending bill.
Sure enough, the press has taken notice. And now, they wait. . .[...]
“Sometimes I wish I wasn’t chained to this one spot,” says Burgess Everett, Politico’s chief Manchin correspondent. “But, at the same time, this is the best place to get the news of the day because it’s what everyone is interested in.”
The power and spotlight has earned the gentleman from West Virginia a new nickname.
“Mister President,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) once said, greeting Manchin in a Capitol Hill elevator.
“It looks like we have President Manchin instead of President Biden,” Faiz Shakir, a close adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told the New York Times.
“Maybe we should say President Manchin at this point!” then-Fox News anchor Chris Wallace chuckled on the air.
It’s been an eventful first year of the Manchin presidency. His Washington home, a large boat on the Potomac, has become a floating West Wing: a place that the White House chief of staff (among others) has visited, and where Manchin has hosted raucous, bipartisan parties.
The journalists doing the waiting are proxies for a Washington establishment eager to see how the Biden administration plans to make its mark, and for the millions of Americans who care about an agenda that could change the trajectory of a teetering democracy and a warming planet. They wait for the senator from West Virginia to decide the fate of Cabinet-level nominees (sorry, Neera Tanden). They wait for him to agree to stimulus funding in the midst of the pandemic, which he did. They wait for him to find enough Republicans to back a voting rights bill as state GOP officials clamp down on voting access, which he hasn’t. People have mostly stopped waiting for him to nuke the filibuster.
These days everyone’s waiting on the Build Back Better bill, the Democrats’ signature piece of legislation, which “President Manchin” keeps vetoing before it gets to President Biden’s desk.
[...]
The whole "President Manchin" bit? Not everybody finds it amusing.
“He’s not a president,” says Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.). “The farthest you’ll get me to go is I see this as the ‘Manchin majority.’ ”
“It’s tongue-in-cheek,” says Romney when reminded of his “Mister President” elevator greeting.
“The fact is, he’s just a senator,” says Anita Dunn, who until recently was a top adviser to Biden.
Plus, she points out, “He supported the rescue plan, he supported the bipartisan infrastructure plan, he has supported the president and his agenda and has worked hard to find a way to support the final big piece of the economic agenda and has negotiated in good faith around it.”
“I don’t think it’s a coup,” says Ben Nelson, former Democratic senator from Nebraska, unprompted, of the Manchin presidency. . ."
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