The Self-Appointed ‘King of America,’ Joe Manchin, Has More Bad Faith Obstruction Of The Biden Agenda To Offer

The prima donna Vichy Democrat diva Sen. Joe Manchin is desperate for attention again. “What’s all this talk about war, it should be about me!” Can his rival prima donna Vichy Democrat diva Sen. Kyrsten Sinema be far behind?

President Biden tried to revive his Build Back Better Agenda in his State of The Union address – Congress still has not passed a spending plan which was due last September 30 because of obstructionist Republicans and Vichy Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema who are enabling them, and the next funding deadline is March 11 – but the self-appointed “King of America,” Joe Manchin (in his narcissistic mind) was having none of it. He was too busy hanging out with his Republican pals pretending to project mythical “bipartisanship,” which is just another word for the Republican obstruction that he is enabling.

The Hill reports, Manchin pours water on Biden’s attempt to revive Build Back Better:

West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin (D) poured cold water on President Biden’s attempt to revive the core elements of his Build Back Better agenda, questioning the president’s claim that passing a $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion spending package would “lower costs” for most Americans.

“They just can’t help themselves,” Manchin quipped when asked by reporters after Biden’s State of the Union speech whether he was surprised by the president’s effort to try to use the moment to try to revive his stalled climate and social spending plan.

“I don’t know where that came from,” he joked.

“Nothing’s changed,” he said.

“There might be parts they want to talk about. I don’t know. That was a little bit far,” he added, referring to the list of expensive Build Back Better items that Biden tried to put back on the table Thursday evening.

Manchin also sounded skeptical about Biden’s claim that his Build Back Better plan will fight inflation by lowering costs.

“I’ve never found out that you can lower costs by spending more,” he said.

That answer prompted “Mr. 47 Percent“Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who was walking alongside Manchin across the Capitol Rotunda and sat with Manchin during the address, to exclaim, “You can’t say it better than that.”

Yuck it up, you out of touch millionaire chuckleheads. Did they never learn the business axiom, “you have to spend money to make money“? Like “Mittens” Romney said the other day:

Right back atcha clueless rich white guy.

Steve Benen explains, Joe Manchin’s flawed case against Build Back Better investments (excerpt):

For those wondering whether a Build Back Better package is still possible, Manchin’s rhetoric was hardly encouraging, and probably did not go unnoticed at the White House.

But the senator’s reaction was also flawed in a couple of ways.

At face value, Manchin’s pushback might have some common-sense appeal: It seems difficult to imagine spending more and saving more simultaneously.

But in practice, it’s not that simple. If Congress were to invest in affordable child care, for example, millions of American families would see their costs cut in a significant way. The government could spend more, and in turn, families could save more.

Ancillary benefits soon follow: Not only would the kids benefit, but their parents would find it easier to get back to work, which helps employers and generates tax revenue.

What’s more, the idea that policymakers can’t “lower costs by spending more” is belied by all sorts of examples. A government can invest in a bridge and lower costs by preventing flood damage. A government can invest in food safety inspections and lower costs by preventing consumers from getting sick. A government can invest in enforcing tax laws and lower costs by collecting from taxpayers what they owe. A government can invest in agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and lower costs by not having to clean up financial catastrophes.

It’s possible, in other words, to spend and save at the same time. It just requires responsible decision making, not glib rhetoric.

The prima donna Vichy Democrat diva Sen. Joe Manchin is back to playing his favorite game today. “Give me the chance to come up with a bill that my Republican pals can support” in pursuit of the mythical “bipartisan” beast. Sen. Manchin has done this numerous times in his career and he has always failed to deliver. (He was not the lead negotiator on the infrastructure bill, just one of the Gang of Twenty). This is just his way of getting the press to follow him around and give him the attention that he so craves while running out the clock, and maybe eventually producing a bill that none of his Republican pals will support. And the Senate filibuster rule? “Too bad, I will never vote to reform the Senate filibuster rule, not even for my own bill.” It is all a game of bad faith and appeasement of Sedition Party obstruction.

We have seen this movie too many times. We know how it ends.

And yet the Associated Press falls for it, again. Manchin fans faint hopes for stalled social, climate bill:

Pivotal Sen. Joe Manchin floated the broad outlines Wednesday of a reconfigured social and environment package that aims half its resources at reducing federal deficits, a day after President Joe Biden suggested refocusing his own more ambitious but stalled plan.

Manchin, D-W.Va., whose opposition doomed Biden’s 10-year, roughly $2 trillion measure in December, provided no figures or details. But in briefly describing his ideas to reporters, he provided a faint flicker of hope that Democrats might revive some version of Biden’s marquee legislative priority this election year.

“If you want to talk, don’t you think you should get your financial house in order,” Manchin said. “If they’re not serious about inflation and debt, then it would be hard for me to negotiate on anything.”

Democrats had argued the House-approved bill was mostly paid for and said it would help families cope with inflation by providing them with more federal help.

Manchin said there have been “no formal talks” over resuscitating the effort and said he has not discussed his ideas with the White House. He has said for months that the House-approved bill would fuel inflation, but he did not say Wednesday what he meant by using the legislation to curb price increases that have rippled across the economy.

Manchin said he wanted to raise revenue by boosting taxes on the rich and corporations and by curbing prices of the prescription drugs that Medicare buys for its beneficiaries. The savings not used for deficit reduction could go for a priority like using tax credits and other incentives to reduce pollutants that contribute to global warming.

All of those were in the Biden-backed bill that Manchin derailed in December. But the sidelined legislation was much broader, also including initiatives like enhanced child tax credits, health care subsidies and free pre-school.

* * *

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a progressive who clashed repeatedly with Manchin over the social and environment bill, didn’t rule out accepting a smaller package if it included accomplishments like reducing prescription drug and child care costs. But he seemed reluctant to bow to Manchin’s proposals.

“Mr. Manchin doesn’t, last I heard, run the United States Senate. Our job is to bring forth the legislation that the American people want. Mr. Manchin can vote no,” Sanders said.

“A lot of discussions going on among senators,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said when asked if Biden’s words had prompted new movement on the push.

The Hill adds, Manchin proposes dramatically scaled down version of Build Back Better (excerpt):

The West Virginia senator clarified he hasn’t made any formal counterproposal to the White House but is sketching the outlines of a proposal that he could support along with the rest of the Senate Democratic Caucus.

Whatever Manchin ultimately agrees to would have a different name than the Build Back Better Act, which he said in December he couldn’t support.

“There’s not a proposal, there’s just a conversation,” he said of informal talks with White House officials.

And there it is: Manchin’s “let’s slow everything down and talk about it … incessantly,” and do nothing. Congress has had over a year. The serious members of Congress who actually do the hard work have already done the work, long ago, and the House has voted on these bills, several times already. It is only the dysfunctional Senate with obstructionist Republicans and Vichy Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema who are enabling them who are preventing getting any work done.

Did I mention the next government funding deadline is March 11?

Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman at the Washington Post also fall into the trap of believing the “sincerity” of Joe Manchin. Please, the man is a manipulative liar and exudes bad faith. Stop falling for  his “Aw shucks, I’m just a simple country bumpkin” shtick. Manchin says he’s ready to negotiate again. Democrats must hold him to it.

During President Biden’s State of the Union address, Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) sat with Republicans, which was either a heartwarming gesture of bipartisanship or a cruel troll aimed at his own party. A day later, he’s engaged in one of his favorite games, hinting that he’s again open to negotiating over a scaled-down package of climate and social spending.

Though Democrats might feel tempted to throttle Manchin for the harm he’s done by killing Biden’s Build Back Better reconciliation bill, their best option now is to take him at his word — and try to hold him to it.

His word? His word is worthless.

To be sure, Manchin greeted Biden’s speech by scorning the president’s insistence that more spending now might help bring down costs for ordinary Americans. But now he’s again back to saying he might be open to something that could pass by the Senate reconciliation process, meaning with only Democrats.

Manchin’s latest stance, which he outlined in an interview with Politico, works like this. First, he wants everything in the package to be paid for over the long term.

Second, he says Democrats should get revenue from two sources: tax reform (reversing some GOP tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, as BBB would have done) and allowing the government to negotiate prices for some prescription drugs and capping some price hikes at inflation, which could save the government hundreds of billions of dollars.

Do you see the problen here? Manchin’s rival, prima donna Vichy Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, has promised her corporate donors that she will obstruct to the death any effort to reverse their Trump tax cuts (despite the fact that she voted against them). Manchin is only one half of the dynamic duo of dipshits.

Third, he wants to take those savings and split them equally between deficit reduction and spending on climate change.

That would still leave a lot of BBB behind, of course. But a Democratic aide says this could be a potentially fruitful opening. Via this route, you probably could raise revenue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on tax incentives and other measures to encourage the manufacture and consumption of alternative energy sources (as BBB would have included).

“This is his way of saying he’s open for business,” the aide tells us, adding that if Manchin is serious, “we need to take this deal immediately.” [Get a clue. He is not serious.]

But what would this look like? Well, according to Steve Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, a reasonable starting point would be the revenue that the House version of BBB would have raised, which total nearly $1.5 trillion, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.

Those revenue raisers include a variety of corporate tax reforms and higher rates on top earners, which Manchin appears open to. Following his own template here, if you plowed a bit more than $700 billion of this into deficit reduction, that would leave at least another $700 billion for spending.

“Half could be devoted to the deficit, and half to spending priorities,” Rosenthal told us.

That would cover the $555 billion to encourage alternative energy sources in the original BBB, and leave a couple hundred billion left to spend.

Following Manchin’s template further, you might be able to do some more genuinely good things. Prescription drug pricing reform would raise nearly $300 billion, according to Kaiser Family Foundation estimates.

Do you see the problem here? Manchin’s rival, prima donna Vichy Democrat Kyrsten Sinema aka “Pharma Girl” is a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Pharma. Once again, Manchin is only one half of the dynamic duo of dipshits.

If you add that to the aforementioned couple hundred billion, you could fund expanded subsidies for lower-income people who buy health coverage on the Affordable Care Act Exchanges, expand the pool of people eligible for those subsidies, and fund Medicaid for people living in red states that haven’t taken the ACA expansion. All that would benefit millions of people.

“With about $300 billion in savings from lowering drug costs, plus a portion of the revenues from higher taxes, it should be possible to extend premium help to ACA enrollees and cover people left out of Medicaid,” Larry Levitt, the executive vice president for health policy at Kaiser, tells us.

If something like this ends up passing, there will be reason to lament the many solutions to pressing problems that died along with BBB. But the contours of even this scaled-back legislation — on taxes, on health care, on climate — would be profoundly worthwhile.

And here’s the most important point of all: These things are eminently doable. That is, as long as Manchin means what he says. Only Manchin himself knows if that’s the case, of course, but Democrats should do all they can to find out one way or the other.

With all this fawning attention the media is giving Joe Manchin, we are about to hear from his rival prima donna Vichy Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, who is jealous and feeling neglected by the media. What demands does “princess” have now?