As of today, January 20, it’s Joe Biden’s Washington, D.C.—a (hopefully) calmer, more orderly and more boring place than the Trump version of the capital. And one of the most powerful people in town, maybe the most powerful person in the Senate, is going to be a man who openly disdains D.C., even as he’s spent the last decade there: West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin.
The most obvious source of Manchin’s power is simple math. With the Democrats having only 50 votes in the Senate, the entire party will have to vote in lockstep to pass any sort of legislation, even reconciliation bills that require only a bare majority. That means any Democrat can theoretically hold up legislation they disagree with, and Manchin is probably the most likely to break with his caucus.
The chamber’s most conservative Democrat, Manchin won his first Senate election in 2010, after running an ad in which he vowed to cut federal spending, touted an NRA endorsement and shot a bullet through the cap-and-trade bill Democrats were trying to push through Congress. He won reelection in 2018 when all the other red-state Democrats floundered, in part because many West Virginians don’t associate him with the national party. And he’s voted with Republicans many times, siding with them to oppose environmental regulations in the Obama era and voting to confirm many of Donald Trump’s cabinet and judicial nominees, including Brett Kavanaugh. He brags about this record of breaking with Democrats on his website, and has cultivated a reputation as someone who crosses party lines proudly and often. Most Democratic senators don’t need to be convinced to go along with their own party’s priorities, but Manchin is not most Democratic senators.
Progressives need Manchin, but Manchin doesn’t need them
His status as the Senate’s swing vote is such that the political press hangs on his every word. When he told Jake Tapper that he would prefer targeted stimulus to $2,000 checks for everyone in the next round of COVID relief, it put him seemingly in opposition with the incoming Biden administration’s goals. When he said he was opposed to expanding the Supreme Court and getting rid of the filibuster, it pretty much ended those progressive dreams of expanding Democratic power. (He’s open to statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico, another way for Democrats to acquire more influence in the Senate, but it’s unclear how that would happen with the filibuster intact.)
Naturally, progressives and leftists despise Manchin. In West Virginia, he’s held in low regard by activists who remember slights like his endorsement of a Republican in the 1996 gubernatorial race after he lost the Democratic primary to Charlotte Pritt, a more liberal figure who was backed by unions. An attempt to primary Manchin from the left in 2018 flopped badly, leaving progressive West Virginians with no choice but to vote for him in the general.
This dynamic is replicated on a larger scale in the Senate. Democrats need Manchin’s support to pass legislation, but Manchin has a base of support independent from the party; opposing other Democrats may make him more popular among his constituents. In nearly every interaction Manchin has with institutions and figures to his left, it’s the senator who has all the leverage. That may be why he has ascended to near the top of the Democratic Senate hierarchy, getting a slot in leadership after the 2016 election and in 2018 getting the top position on the Energy Committee, an assignment that enraged many progressives.
Manchin’s strange position as the Democratic climate change leader
The second source of Manchin’s power in the 117th Congress is that committee leadership post. Thanks to the Georgia Senate results, he will now chair the Senate Energy Committee. There’s some bitter irony here, as Manchin’s unabashed pro-coal stance has put him well outside of the Democratic mainstream on climate change. He’s certainly no friend of the Green New Deal.
Still, there’s some cautious opposition even on the left that Manchin may have evolved from his climate-bill-shooting past. Coal has been increasingly replaced as an energy source by natural gas and renewables, and coal jobs in the state and nationally are declining. In a recent interview with E&E News, Manchin emphasized the need to navigate the transition away from dirty energy in a way that didn’t devastate miners and others. “You cannot leave people behind,” he said. “When you are doing the things we are doing, you have to do it in a way that you don't create one vast economic depression on the price of coal because another one has opened up with opportunities.”
(This is exactly the same point that Hillary Clinton tried to make, once upon a time in 2016, when she delivered her infamous “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners out of work” sound bite.)
The fact that Manchin is talking in those terms shows he’s changed his views since 2010. The worrying thing to climate activists is that he’s in favor of an “all of the above” climate policy, where the country invests in renewable energy but doesn’t push especially hard to halt fossil fuel production. (In that E&E interview he dismissed a fracking ban out of hand.) That’s basically the same stance Barack Obama had in his second term, and it has been long opposed by environmentalists who argue that to reduce emissions, you actually need to crack down on dirtier forms of energy production and push to keep oil, natural gas and coal in the ground.
Manchin will almost certainly advance some bills out of committee intended to fight climate change, like tax credits for renewable energy projects or a clean energy standard, which would mandate that a certain amount of electricity come from low-emission sources. Those bills are unlikely to satisfy most climate activists, however, and getting actual legislation passed and signed into law is another matter.
Manchin mirrors Biden’s love of compromise
Manchin’s final source of power is that he is one of the few federal legislators who regularly works across the aisle effectively. He did so during the most recent negotiations over the stimulus, when he and—no kidding, his jars of 170-proof moonshine—played a key role in fostering a compromise framework that became the basis of the legislation that eventually passed.
The ability to break legislative logjams is going to be vital in the months ahead. Democrats technically have the votes to do whatever they want—a 100-percent unified party caucus could, theoretically, eliminate the filibuster or otherwise work to get things done on party-line votes. But Biden has already signaled that he wants to deal with Republicans on matters like COVID stimulus. The incoming president has an evident love of compromise and dealmaking, and a distaste for the raw exercise of partisan power. Manchin shares those same instincts. Both men may be centrists in their politics, but they also enjoy the process of hashing out differences between competing factions.
The good news for progressives is that Manchin’s politics aren’t set in stone. His love of compromise makes him more malleable than political ideologues. He’s shifted his position on climate slightly over the years, and has evolved from an NRA-endorsed Senate candidate to a prominent supporter of (moderate) gun control who was even trying to advance the issue during the Trump administration. He’s the sort of senator who you can work with.
The bad news for progressives is that given all of his clout and influence, they will have to work with him.
