Manchinations

West Virginia is America writ small.  In a remarkably short and easily verified time, European transplants felled the great forests of the East, moved on to tear up the Midwestern prairie, over-grazed the grasslands of the great wild West and otherwise dug up, poisoned and destroyed the land, air and water to the point where it's increasingly difficult for them to replenish themselves and sustain the life that had previous proliferated on this continent.  While of course wiping out the civilizations that preceded them.  All of that contributes mightily to the global climate and environmental crises.

It's the same and mostly ongoing story in every state, but it remains a particularly obvious feature of West Virginia, where in the process of demolishing the natural environment, to the point of blowing the tops off huge mountains, industries owned by the rich enriched themselves, while exploiting, deforming and impoverishing not only the land but the rest of the people, yet convincing them that it's for their own good.  

Most other states show conspicuous signs of change, for good or ill, and often dramatic and dynamic tensions.  But West Virginia seems determined to double down on what is destroying it, namely the coal industry.  Population is steadily dropping, the economy is in free fall, but the legislature maintains its fealty to the coal barons.

Meanwhile, its Democratic Senator Joe Manchin is lapping up his fame as the deciding vote in the Senate, making demands and pronouncements, notably on the filibuster.  He is unshakably opposed to changing it because, he says, the filibuster promotes bi-partisanship.

The only possibly true thing in that statement is that he opposes ending or apparently even modifying the filibuster, by which every significant piece of legislation requires 60 votes, not just a majority 51.  For nearly the full 8 years of the Obama administration, the Republicans used the filibuster to obstruct every piece of legislation proposed by a Democrat, regardless of its content.  They never compromised, only obstructed.  That's only one of the factual arguments that makes Manchin's argument absurd.

So what is really going on?  I propose two related possibilities.  First, Manchin doesn't want to be the deciding vote, because he wants to be able to vote against anything which threatens to threaten the coal barons of his state, without offending his party leadership.  If he's the swing vote, he can't get away with that--he'll have to make enemies of somebody.  So he needs the filibuster to provide him cover by requiring 60 votes instead of 51.

More specifically, I wonder if this isn't aimed at the infrastructure bill.  Manchin wants an infrastructure bill--he wants the money for West Virginia's crumbling roads and bridges, etc. that it can't even afford to repair.  But his coal baron overlords don't want all the green energy stuff currently in the bill.

The outcome he may be looking for is that the Biden administration jobs/infrastructure bill gets split into several bills, one of which is a roads and bridges infrastructure bill that Republicans can vote for--which means all that green energy and climate crisis stuff will be stripped out of it.  Then when the green stuff gets into another bill, Manchin can vote against it and still get the big highway bucks for West Virginia.  

If that's what he's doing--and I have no idea if it is, this is just my suspicion--it's a very dangerous game, not only for him, but for the country and its future.