Decoding Manchin

Yeah I know, it’s tempting for progressives to demonize WV Sen. Joe Manchin. But I am reading his filibuster talk a bit differently. He’s got an interesting idea. Give Republicans a chance. And if they don’t take it, then what? Don’t deny the filibuster until they prove they don’t deserve it. Schedule votes and see what they do. If they fail the test, Democrats have a better case to yank the filibuster. My hunch is Biden and Manchin are in sync on this plan.

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Author: craigcrawford

Trail Mix Host. Lapsed journalist, author & retired pundit happily promoting nothing but the truth for Social Security checks.

62 thoughts on “Decoding Manchin”

  2. above quote was from charleston gazette-mail in 2017 except the cartoonist cleaned up the actual wording.

    manchin also said in the article:

    “The bottom line is, if it doesn’t help West Virginia, it doesn’t make sense to me, and just because there’s an election doesn’t mean I sign on or don’t sign on. If you look at all the time I’ve been here, there’s stuff I don’t sign on to. I just don’t think it’s a good way to do business when you don’t try to get people from the front end.”

    and went on to say:

    “I’m not scared of an election, let’s put it that way. Elections do not bother me or scare me. I’m going to continue to do the same thing I’ve always done, extremely independent.”….
    “I want to be able to reach out to my friends on the other side and say, ‘Guys, you like anything here, can we do something different, any changes, what would make you comfortable to sign on?’” 

  4. both biden and manchin would probably agree with this quote from hubse  (in re brexit):

    We heard the expression “compromise is not a dirty word” a few times during these negotiations and the full quote is from Sir Nicolas Winton who said ‘Never forget that compromise is not a dirty word. Life depends on compromise.’
    I am reminded of another quote allegedly by the author Larry David who said of Senator Henry Clay “You’re unhappy. I’m unhappy too. Have you heard of Henry Clay? He was the Great Compromiser. A good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied, and I think that’s what we have here.”

  5. I am guessing that there are at least a couple of republicans who would consider voting for some of the infrastructure bill(s).  Manchin might be the only Dem who can talk to them now that Doug Jones is out.  A deal could be worked out that makes Manchin look like a hero to WV folks needing a job and a road.

  7. Sure. Proffer your arm to a rabid, junkyard dog.  Then, after he’s done mauling  you, call the dog catcher.  
    C’mon.
    Manchin is a Republican in Dem clothing.

  8. The only way Republicans know to compromise is for them to get everything they want.   Quid pro nada.  For instance, if Dems agreed the border needed to be closed down ~for the children~, would Republicans then agree to ban assault weapons and ghost guns? Nope.

  10. also relevant, more manchin quotes from the examiner via msn in february:

    The Byrd rule makes sure that legislation stays within its guardrails or its lanes, which is basically budget-related,” Manchin said in a 44-minute interview with the Washington Examiner.
    “I will defend the Byrd rule the same way I defend the filibuster,” he said. “I am not going to just set back and say, ‘Oh, well, he really didn’t mean it,’” he said of the late senator whose seat he now holds. “Sen. Byrd basically protected the institution, and that is how he protected it,” Manchin said of the rule.
    Manchin said the way the Senate was intended to govern is very different than the role the House plays in legislating:
    “We deliberate over the real hot topics that the House may send over to us because of whoever is control over there. They take a simple majority.”
    In the House, Manchin said, if you have 218 votes, you don’t care what the other 217 want: “You can shove it down their throat. That was not the intent and purpose of the Senate.”

  11. Prince Philip of Britain dies at age 99 (cnbc.com)

    and from dailybeast:

    Minutes after the British royal family announced that Queen Elizabeth II’s husband, Prince Philip, had died at the age of 99, the sleuths at Fox & Friends blamed their inevitable culprits: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

    Host Brian Kilmeade immediately linked the death of the extremely old and sickly Duke of Edinburgh to Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah Winfrey, which aired last month and contained shocking claims of racism and cruel treatment against Meghan by royal family members.

  12. back to more manchin

    CNN:

    In a wide-ranging interview with CNN, Manchin underscored his commitment to bipartisanship, warning that he won’t be willing to go it alone with Democrats until more serious negotiations get underway with Republicans. Manchin’s comments once again highlight why the moderate Democrat is the central political figure in Washington as President Joe Biden’s agenda depends on his vote in the evenly divided Senate.
    “January 6 changed me. I never thought in my life, I never read in history books to where our form of government had been attacked, at our seat of government, which is Washington, DC, at our Capitol, by our own people,” Manchin said, adding, “So, something told me, ‘Wait a minute. Pause. Hit the pause button.’ Something’s wrong. You can’t have this many people split to where they want to go to war with each other.”
    Some of the other key points Manchin made in his interview with CNN included:
    He said that “reconciliation was never intended to be our main focus or our main vehicle for legislation” but that there is “a time and a place” for its use and emphasized, “I’m not killing the filibuster.”
    He called Biden’s pick to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives “well qualified.”
    He said he wants to meet with Georgia Democratic Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to discuss voting rights legislation.
    He said that he has an open line of communication with the White House and has had “a good friendship” with President Biden for a long time and a great relationship with Vice President Kamala Harris.

  14. Whether we like it or not…  we are going to have to dance with Joe Manchin.  We praise Senator Romney when he bucks his party…  but Manchin…  not so much.
     
    I know…  I want to bash him too…  but I’m going to take Craig’s approach and give him a chance.

  16. The wrecking crew were phenomenally phenomenal.

    Giants.

    Why man, they didst bestride this narrow world like colossi…..

  17. Joe is what he is.  He’s the only statewide Dem in WV now, but he does have pretty broad support in the state.  Hell, he was Secretary of State and Governor before he became Senator after Robert Byrd died.  He’s a lifelong NRA member – not exactly a rarity in WV.  He’s from Farmington, WV – which is ummm, rural (pop. 375).  It’s a community outside Fairmont, which is a small city (if you stretch the definition of city to include big towns.  I can’t imagine that he’d ever be confused with a liberal.  He’s a pretty good pol and he knows how to work a room.  I went to the odd reception/fundraiser for him when I worked at the hospital and big law firm, respectively, when he was running for Sec. of State and Governor, and he was easy to talk to and you never got the sense that he thought himself better or smarter than you.  Had to do a little hospital lobbying in the early 2000s on efforts to get insurance companies to pay medical bills timely and with fewer markdowns, and he set up appointments with key legislators and the then governor to facilitate those efforts.  I do believe that he genuinely believes that he can only take positions he could explain to folks back home in Farmington and have them understand that the positions he takes will benefit them and the state.  If he sees the current infrastructure/jobs bill as providing significant benefit to WV and its people he’ll find a way to support it unless my read on him for the past 20 years is just wrong.

  19. Though I can’t imagine someone building a deck out of something termites would eat.   Like non-treated wood or something.  Commercials are weird.   We had a local one around here with some goober of a contractor on there and his catch-line was, “NEVER give a contractor ANNNNNY money up front!”    Oh, he was a sore spot in my neck of the woods.    Just TRY to get any substantial work done without a Material and Labor deposit.    lol   

  20. from daniel kelly on all the wobble news with links to his musical tribute lyrics, scientific info and photos

    A song about a recent experimental results in quantum physics. Some posters of the Standard Model: https://cds.cern.ch/images/OPEN-PHO-C…​ https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comm…​ https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswi…​ The Muon g-2 experiment: https://www.hep.ucl.ac.uk/muons/g-2/​ The photo is of the team that did the theoretical calculations, not the practical experiment: https://news.fnal.gov/2020/06/physici…​ A good video explaining the physics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uckuq…​ Some photos from the Brookhaven site: https://www.flickr.com/photos/brookha…​ Chords and Lyrics: https://www.folklounge.org/portfolio/…

  21. for those who like to sing and strum along, the last stanza and chorus to kelly’s ditty:

    Now there’s no need for you to be frightened, no worm-holes will darken your door,
    It just means the we, don’t understand what we see,  and we must learn a little bit more

    the chorus with chords:

    G7            C         G       C         F                  C
    There’s a gap in your standard model, something there that you can’t see
        F                 C             G          G7      C
    It isn’t a quark or neutrino, now what could it possibly be?

  22. (Bloomberg) — U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz hired one of former President Donald Trump’s defense attorneys amid a federal probe into the lawmaker’s relationships with women recruited online for sex, including possibly a 17-year-old girl.

    Marc Mukasey confirmed in an email Friday that he’d been hired by Gaetz, a Florida Republican and staunch Trump supporter. The New York-based Mukasey is also one of the lawyers representing the former president in a separate criminal investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance as well as another probe by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

    […]

    Mukasey, the son of former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, is known in New York legal circles as a protege of another Trump lawyer, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. But Marc Mukasey has distanced himself from the election-fraud claims pushed by Trump and Giuliani.

  23. I have to say that Gaetz doesn’t have an original bone in his body.  He’s up shit creek without a paddle and apparently thinks Mukasey is a life ring.  

  24. From WaPo – 
    Biden unveils commission to study possible expansion of Supreme Court

    President Biden created a bipartisan commission Friday to study structural changes to the Supreme Court, giving the group 180 days to produce a report on a range of thorny topics including court expansion and term limits.

     

    The commission, composed of 36 legal scholars, former federal judges and practicing lawyers, fulfills Biden’s campaign promise to establish such a group after activists pushed him to back expanding the court following Republicans’ rush to confirm Justice Amy Coney Barrett shortly before last year’s election. Biden has said he is “not a fan” of adding seats to the Supreme Court, but he has declined to say whether he supports any other changes to its structure.
    (Continues)

     

    It ain’t everything, but it’s not nothing either.

  26. Pogo – I am all for each senator and representative to get what they can from each bill.  With earmarks back there should be a lot of horsetrading going on.  If Manchin stays true to WV and does not play like a Susan he should work out some extra bridges and plumbing for WV and the Dems get what they want too.

  27. And for Gaetz it just keeps on coming.  WaPo.

    House Ethics committee to investigate Rep. Matt Gaetz
    …

    The House Ethics committee on Friday said it would launch an investigation into Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who has been accused of a sexual relationship with an underage girl, among a litany of other things.

    In a statement Friday, the committee chairman said they were aware of allegations that Gaetz “may have engaged in sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift, in violation of House Rules, laws, or other standards of conduct.”

    Gaetz has not been charged with any crimes and has denied the allegations, claiming he and his family are the victims of an extortion plot.

    Ol’ Matt’s gonna be busy.

  28. Ms. Bronc, I think you probably have hit the nail on the head.  That would be very Bob Byrdian of Manchin, and he was a huge Byrd fan. and since Joe served with Byrd and well knows his reputation for bringing home the bacon, i’m guessing convos with Joe are happening to secure his support for the bill, and that eventually Joe will somehow figure out that his previous stand against using reconciliation to pass another spending measure may have been a bit hasty.

  30. Just had a message that vaccine was available.   Was.  By the time I logged in, it was all gone.

  31. Walgreens has appointments available in your area

    i was in and out of my Walgreens appt. in 10 mins, the nurse was very nice, and since it is by appointment there was only one other person in the pharmacy area with me👍

  35. On the morning surf I saw an account of whale watching crew that saw 70 Orcas kill and eat a 52 ft. Blue Whale, off the west coast of Australia. 
    The company had their biologist onboard she blogged about.  It took hours. 
    I only saw stills of it , there’s got to be video. 

  37. This is pretty mind blowing Orcas swim in pods of family members.  12 maybe ?  This means that over 70 of them were all talking to each other. 

    At first, it seemed like a normal day of whale watching, said Kristy Brown, a marine biologist with Naturaliste Charters, a company that runs whale-watching tours in Western Australia. The vessel happened upon two pods of orcas in Bremer Bay Canyon, about 28 miles (45 kilometers) off the coast, that were “playing and surfing the waves,” Brown wrote in a March 16 blog post.

     
     

     

  39. Nope.  None are close enough to to me.  They’re all J&J anyway, which I don’t want now that they’ve mentioned blood clots.  I already have a heart arrhythmia.  I don’t need to risk a clot for something that offers little over 50/50 prevention  of a severe case and no protection against it. 

  42. Blue –
    Those folks hit a great lick.  3,600 ain’t bad.  Now if we can just teach em’ to not eat plastic shopping bags.  They look like jellyfish , prime turtle food.  They are also fooled by latex balloons.
    Their is a lady that runs an anti-balloon release site for this very reason.

    I wish we would go back to planting trees when people die. Releasing a valuable rare gas to the sky along with 4 sq. ft. of mylar that can short out the grid seems like such an odd thing to do now.

  43. Back to  WV Joe . 
    If there is a state that needs rebuilding it’s West Virginia. Watching PBS all these years , I have more than a passing knowledge of it’s history. 
    Extractive industries  never make  the locals better off.  Think about all the trees and coal that came out of  there . That money did not flow through those  hamlets. 
    Screwing the help was part of the business plan there.  How’d you  like being paid in “script”  , while your employers are being paid in “Yankee Green Backs” ?
    What did all that leave us ?  Opioid addicts getting lost in holes in the ground trying  to strip copper wire out of dead coal mines.  And mountains  that look like Herman Munster’s head. 
    Answer –
    Build a Wind School, and test site   on one of them , call it “The Joe Manchin Appalachian Wind School and  Test Site”.  
    Then  start placing turbines on all those  other’s  .  Give that to WV Joe .  He’s got the hammer, give him a nail.
    Democrats have a long history of going to West Virginia to save it from it from it’s  self. 

  44. So, what happened to Bob Costa  ?
    Amy Walter  hosting again  tonight .
    Amy Walter is America’s Political Pixie .

  45. Amy Walter  –
    You just see a still image of her , and you put her in a green costume  flying across the stage on a wire. 
    You watch her do her job , and she knows what is under  Mitch ‘s finger nails.  

  47. Hey Craig  –
    Go host Washington Week , they are like Jeopardy, guest host after guest host. 
    Give it a shot , it ain’t cable . 

  49. The Sunday Service here –
    On a flat, barren expanse of Martian real estate, a tiny helicopter is poised to make aviation history.
    NASA’s experimental Mars helicopter, known as Ingenuity, is scheduled to take its much-anticipated first test flight on the red planet on Sunday. If successful, the joyride will be the first powered, controlled flight conducted on another planet.
    https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/nasa-helicopter-set-historic-first-flight-mars-rcna624
     

     

     

     

  50. A young woman named Mimi  is the one to watch , Ingenuity is her baby .
    This ship has a heating system onboard , it comes in around 5 lbs.  on Earth. 
    There is piece of the Wright Flyer on board. 
     
    Go MIMI Go ! 

  52. My first helicopter safety lesson –
    “Gentlemen  this is a helicopter, it is Not a “Chopper”, or a “Whorley Bird”, it is a helicopter . You may call it a “ship” , or a “Helo”. 
    Do not walk uphill into the main rotor , do not walk downhill  into the main rotor.  Do not walk near the tail rotor. 
    The cabin floor  is extremely light weight  be careful with your “cap boxes”. 
    Then I was part of the last group into the field with 3 other flying squirrels .
    All these guys were Vietnam vets.  Except for one .
    We took off from “Lost Canyon” across the lake  at about  five feet above the water , haulin’ ass , nose down and tail up. 
    Just when we  were all sure we would die  on the far side of the shore , we popped  over a ridge  and into a canyon , then he showed off his flying skills. 
    At 150 mph snaking down a canyon , nearly 90 degrees left , then right. 
     
    I was hooked.  I was fucking alive.  I was 29 .
     

  53. OK, BiD, stop complaining you can’t get a vaccine when the U.S is drowning in doses and stop posting misinformation about the J&J vaccine, maybe put in a little patriotic effort

    There’s no way you know what brands each individual Walgreens has

    I looked up your “blood clot” lies- 4 cases in EU not definitively linked to J&J, and 5 MILLION doses administered in the U.S. without any reported “blood clots”, so your odds of getting a clot from J&J is upwards of 1 in 5 million, i.e. ZERO

  54. 2% of Africans have received a COVID vaccine and you‘re complaining the Walgreens down the street might not have your preferred dose, sweet Christ🙄

  55. If you’re afraid of the vaccine, i get it, i was, too, a little- you suck it up, close your eyes, and do your bit
     
    DO YOUR BIT
     
    AAARRRGGGHHH
     
    this shit killed our buddy, for crying out loud

  56. We’ll never achieve a 70% vaccine acceptance rate, we’ll definitely never successfully support efforts to get underdeveloped nations a 70% vaccination rate, and we’ll never be rid of this shit
     
     …but let’s colonize Mars🤮

  57. i’d have polio and smallpox right now if my grandparents’ generation was as stupid and selfish as Americans are, these days

  58. I trained  our “flying squirrels” for 2 years. 
    I took two guys to the field that had never heard the term , “Crescent Wrench” .
    I also had 5 or 6  kids that got it. 
    Every morning I looked at  them and said ,  ” We slam steel”.
    And we did .  I drilled a shot hole in May of 79′ , on the West end of the Unitas  at over 10,000 ft.  That strange record may still hold.  It was a Texaco contract. 
    At the time , this was big time oil hunting.  And a huge amount of drilling knowledge  was found. 

  60. “How’s Bink doing?”
     
    ”Well, he has polio, smallpox, cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis, measles, mumps, rubella, shingles, bubonic plague, and COVID-19, but he’s FREE🇺🇸”

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