Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
From left, Sens. Jon Tester (D-MT), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Mark Warner (D-VA), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Joe Manchin (D-WV) speak to the media after meeting with President Biden about the national infrastructure plan, June 24, 2021, at the White House.
In the first six months of the legislative session, one man has emerged as a national obsession for the left: Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV). Over a decade into his career in Washington, Manchin has recently enjoyed newfound press attention, after the Senate landscape became evenly split following the Georgia runoffs in January. After the historic vote, he found himself dead center, the difference between passing and rejecting partisan legislation in a 50-50 Senate. And he became seen as the major impediment to ending the legislative filibuster and allowing all Senate business to pass with a simple majority.
The fixation on Manchin reached a fever pitch in early June, with the all-time highest number of Google searches for the Appalachian senator. This dovetailed with an op-ed he wrote, announcing that he would neither vote for the ambitious voting rights bill, H.R. 1, nor support abolishing the filibuster.
“No one is exaggerating to say that Manchin is holding more cards and more power and more leverage here than anyone else, and aggressively publicly using it,” says Matt Glassman, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University. “I think he’s driven a harder bargain than people expected.”
In the media, the political scales are often depicted lopsidedly. Manchin sits at the political midpoint, while progressives, like Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and more recently even Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), try to push the party’s agenda further to the left. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) is sometimes lumped in with Manchin, but few other Democratic moderates have made any headlines, quietly falling below the radar of public attention. That mistakes the actual dynamic at work.
Within the Democratic Party, there are a handful of senators who come up again and again as the ones dragging their feet—or outright blocking—a progressive agenda. This includes issues pertaining to the climate crisis, budget reconciliation, the filibuster, minimum wage, and student debt. In 2010, Glenn Greenwald dubbed this phenomenon “Villain Rotation,” where Democratic politicians are willing to “support” progressive legislation as long as it doesn’t stand a chance of passing. When it comes time to kill the initiative, the lead senator doing the deed shifts, so nobody gets full blame. (Ironically, Greenwald was writing at the time about another West Virginia senator, Jay Rockefeller, who also opposed breaking the filibuster.)
As the focus remains on Manchin, the “rotating villain” theory has changed. Unlike other moderate Democrats, Manchin is exceptionally vocal on his stances. As a result, his boisterousness casts a large shadow for the handful of moderate Senate Democrats to hide behind. Instead of an equal distribution of press and criticism on moderate Democrats from the left, there’s been a hyper-concentration on just one man. Instead of a rotating villain, Manchin is a scapegoat, with a small and mighty group quietly backing him.
“Other moderate Democrats are much happier with things being blurry, giving them flexibility to present a wider picture to their constituents,” says Glassman. “They prefer to not be in the limelight.”
But there are a few legislative moments this session that brought this group into the sunlight. One of them took place only last Friday, with the announcement of the bipartisan infrastructure deal. A handful of the nine Democrats backing the deal are the same senators who opposed the $15 minimum-wage increase during voting on the American Rescue Plan in March. These include Sens. Jon Tester (D-MT), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), and Chris Coons (D-DE). But each of these three senators has received only a small fraction of the public scrutiny Manchin’s been subjected to.
The group of moderate Democrats’ voting history gives a glimpse of their stances to come, on everything from climate change initiatives to taxing the wealthy. Despite mounting public support for increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans, the same group of moderate Democrats seems to still be opposed to substantial reform. A survey conducted by Americans for Tax Fairness found that 69 percent of voters support President Biden’s proposals to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations.
But at least based on their voting records, moderate Democrats disagree. In 2015, while in the House, Sinema voted to pass the Death Tax Repeal Act, which would have annihilated the estate tax in its entirety. Back in 2001, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) voted for the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act while serving in the Senate.
Sinema didn’t respond for comment on where she now stands on the estate tax. But a spokesperson for Feinstein pointed out that she now supports modest wealth tax reform, such as a 30 percent tax rate on millionaires, and a bill to eliminate the carried interest loophole, which allows Wall Street firms to pay the capital gains rate on their income—of 15 or 20 percent—as opposed to a higher income tax bracket.
In many ways, the filibuster has served to protect the guise of Democratic consensus the party so desperately tries to maintain.
Other moderates have rejected particular bills. Tester has balked at Sanders’s work on a large reconciliation package to team with the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Sens. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Mark Warner (D-VA) are the remaining holdouts along with Sinema on the PRO Act. And several Democrats have resisted calls to abolish the filibuster, including Feinstein. A whip count from The Washington Post shows as many as 16 Senate Democrats who have not pronounced themselves fully committed on the filibuster.
Yesterday, as Biden visited La Crosse, Wisconsin, to speak about the bipartisan infrastructure plan, he started off by saying the deal was intended to “unite America.” But for progressives, that comes with a cost. In this case, that cost is climate action.
“It would be absolutely irresponsible beyond belief if we did not address the existential crisis of climate change,” Sen. Sanders said in an interview with NPR yesterday. “And there’s virtually no money in the bipartisan bill for climate change.”
One reason these moderate Democrats have flown below the radar is because there have been relatively few roll call votes in the Senate. According to Glassman, Schumer won’t schedule a vote if he doesn’t think it will receive complete Democratic support. This is made clear with the trove of progressive bills that have already passed the House, but lie waiting in the Senate. These include the pro-union Protecting the Right to Organize Act, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, and the American Dream and Promise Act, which would allow DACA recipients to live and work in the country. None of them is scheduled for a vote.
In many ways, the filibuster has served to protect the guise of Democratic consensus the party so desperately tries to maintain. As long as the filibuster remains in place, Democrats can blame Republicans for legislative inaction, as opposed to members of their own party.
“When it takes 60 votes to pass something, it’s also easier to say no,” says Glassman. “It’s an easy cheap no, instead of being the person who killed election reform or the person who killed the minimum wage.”
The trend of one or two moderate Democrats taking on the bulk of political pressure isn’t new. When Sen. Jim Jeffords switched from the Republican to the Democratic Party in 2001, he too was on a knife’s edge. But Manchin’s very public opposition, paired with the sense of legislative urgency Democrats feel to seize the moment of such a slim majority, has put him in an exceptionally precarious position. The problem is that he’s covering for several of his colleagues who aren’t feeling the same pressure.
