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(43,577 posts) Thu Jul 21, 2022, 06:18 PM Jul 2022

Democrats' Dilemma on Manchin

Bash Him, or Bash Big Oil Instead?

With his climate agenda in ruins, President Biden faces a stark political choice, liberal pundits say.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/20/us/politics/democrats-biden-manchin-climate.html

https://archive.ph/FXU7H

Democrats looking to salvage some kind of victory from the smoking ruins of their climate policy have two basic options, political strategists say: slam Senator Joe Manchin, or take the wood to Big Oil. So far, President Biden, a creature of the Senate who prides himself on his bipartisan instincts, has been reluctant to do either. Enter Manchin, the centrist West Virginia Democrat who toyed with embracing Biden’s legislative agenda on climate, only to torpedo it after months of dithering on his end and, frankly, wishful thinking from the White House and its allies.

On Friday, Manchin finally told congressional Democrats he could not support roughly $300 billion in tax incentives for clean energy like solar and wind power, ideas that had remained in discussion after the Build Back Better talks collapsed in December. “Inflation is absolutely killing many, many people,” Manchin said on a West Virginia radio show. “Can’t we wait to make sure that we do nothing to add to that?”

Manchin’s latest dagger has left Democrats scrambling to coalesce around a next-best option that includes allowing Medicare to negotiate prices for prescription drugs and some technical fixes to the Affordable Care Act. The president no longer seems willing to wait on Manchin to come around. On Wednesday, the Biden administration rolled out its latest series of executive actions on climate, including $2.3 billion in funding for states to build “cooling centers” and fresh support for offshore wind farms. But it would take a monumental effort by Congress to more effectively address a threat that scientists warn is accelerating.

In the shorter term, the danger to Biden’s presidency is an existential one. There’s widespread anxiety on the left that young Democrats in particular will be discouraged by Manchin’s apostasy and by party leaders’ inability to take major action, and might stay home in droves in November. That was likely to happen anyway, to some extent, based on who traditionally votes in midterm elections. As the Democratic data firm Catalist concluded in a postelection analysis, thousands of young voters sat on their hands last fall during the governor’s race in Virginia. But given just how micrometer-thin the margins are likely to be in some of this year’s big Senate races, even minor differences in youth turnout matter.

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