Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) speaks with reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, February 5, 2020.
If anyone should support building back better, it’s Joe Manchin III. West Virginia’s economy is hurting; and even though Manchin defends coal, he has to know that coal jobs are not coming back.
Development of West Virginia has to be centered around something else, or the state will continue to lag. Due to the combination of a long-term depressed economy plus the COVID recession, fully 31 percent of West Virginia’s workforce has filed for unemployment since the pandemic began.
Robert Pollin and his colleagues at the Political Economy Research Institute at UMass Amherst have just released a terrific report on how to transform the West Virginia economy via a clean-energy investment project. You should read it yourself, but the basic idea is that a green development strategy, coupled with a “just transition” to re-employ or pension off fossil fuel workers, could bring the state’s economy into the 21st century and create economic activity and jobs based on a renewable-energy strategy.
According to Pollin’s calculations, “the combination of investments in clean energy, manufacturing/infrastructure, and land restoration/agriculture will … create about 41,000 jobs in West Virginia—equal to roughly 5 percent of West Virginia’s current workforce—while providing the foundation for a long-term sustainable growth path for the state.”
It’s the kind of report that a state planning agency would commission and then carry out, if states were serious about economic planning. Pollin and his team have published two other state reports, for Pennsylvania and Ohio, as part of a strategy for a new Appalachia. They serve as templates for the kind of rural development that just might induce Trump voters to give Democrats a second look.
And here’s the best part. Pollin’s report calculates that it would take $2.1 billion per year in public money to carry out this plan for West Virginia clean energy, infrastructure, related manufacturing, land reclamation, and agriculture. But that’s actually less than West Virginia’s projected share of the Biden infrastructure plan, as released during the campaign, which would be about $2.5 billion a year. The final plan is still undergoing refinement.
Also, only about 40,000 West Virginians still work in the fossil fuel industry. Pollin calculates that a just-transition program, for retraining younger ones to get new, well-paying jobs, plus a generous early-retirement program for older ones, would cost only about $140 million a year.
This brings us back to Joe Manchin. The senator has said that he supports a large infrastructure plan, but that he’d like to see it brought up as regular legislation. Team Biden is considering bringing it up as the centerpiece of a second budget reconciliation process, next September. That’s the only way it could pass with a simple majority, absent elimination of the filibuster.
Republicans are uniformly opposed to a large-scale infrastructure plan. If it were taken up as an ordinary bill, it would be killed by filibuster. Manchin has to know that.
So what sort of game is the senator playing? Is this just a bargaining posture that could be solved with a larger dose of federal pork?
Manchin’s defense of the filibuster is long-standing and real. As a centrist Democrat in a red state, Manchin sees himself as a Senate institutionalist and bipartisan bridge-builder. Yet Manchin has left the door open to filibuster reform if Mitch McConnell routinely uses the filibuster to obstruct everything Democrats propose, which McConnell surely will.
At some point, Manchin’s first loyalty has to be to his state and his suffering constituents. That infrastructure bill would do them a world of good.
Joe Biden’s pitch to Manchin is clear. Either support us on ending the filibuster, or support us on including the infrastructure bill as part of the September reconciliation. But either way, please support the bill.
In the legislative endgame, it’s hard to believe that Manchin will put an abstract commitment to defense of the filibuster, or an embrace of an illusory bipartisanship, over the practical needs of his state. And if West Virginia has to get an extra dose of federal aid, LBJ-style, to bring Manchin on board, its citizens have probably earned it.
