WASHINGTON — The Build Back Better Act, a $2 trillion dollar climate and social spending bill championed by the Biden administration, is highly unlikely to receive a vote this year amid the continued hesitance of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to back some of the bill’s more extreme agenda items, as well as his refusal to vote for a bill that will increase the deficit.
Naturally, the left isn’t too happy with him.
During a Friday interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, television personality Charlamagne tha God decided that the reason the bill is likely to die in the Senate is because Manchin is playing the system — he asked Harris if Biden or Manchin was the president of the United States:
“I want to know who the real president of this country is — is it Joe Biden, or Joe Manchin?” Charlamagne asked on his Comedy Central show, “Tha God’s Honest Truth,” while he and Harris discussed Democratic Sen. Manchin’s opposition to some liberal spending legislation being debated on Capitol Hill.
“C’mon, Charlamagne,” she said. “No, no, no, no, it’s Joe Biden,” she repeated as he tried to give his reasons for the question.
“And don’t start talking like a Republican, about asking whether or not he’s president. … And it’s Joe Biden, it’s Joe Biden and I’m vice president and my name is Kamala Harris,” she added defiantly.
Of course, there is some degree of truth to this — Manchin is likely the most powerful politician in the country right now. As the most decidedly centrist Democrat in a 50-50 Senate with Democrats controlling the House and the presidency, the fate of his party’s agenda is often dependent on how he intends to vote.
However, to posit that this means he holds unilateral control over the nation’s political process — solely because he is using his position to vote against a massive spending package that you happen to like — is hyperbolic and irresponsible.
Meanwhile, ABC News tweeted out an article on Joe Manchin siding with Senate Republicans on the bill, bearing a foreboding caption of “A single senator is about to seriously set back an entire presidential agenda.”
A single senator is about to seriously set back an entire presidential agenda. https://t.co/0pvzruT6mV
— ABC News (@ABC) December 17, 2021
Twitter users were quick to point out that Joe Manchin is one of 51 senators — a majority — who are in opposition to the bill. This is effectively the entire basis upon which the Senate functions.
Of course, those demonizing Manchin as some sort of rogue autocrat know this bit of middle school civics full well, but that is irrelevant to them — after all, they must uphold the veneer of injustice upon which they predicate their false sense of victimhood.
That’s how the left is trying to play this off: their entire economic agenda, which they tout as this transformational bastion of equity and socioeconomic justice, is going to die in the Senate because Joe Manchin is an evil coal profiteer who wants to watch Americans suffer so he can make money.
Naturally, this is patently false, and its falsity is something of which most on the left (at least the mainstream left) are well aware. However, it’s the only defense they have — because a piece of legislation that they like is going to die in a 50-50 Senate, the one Democrat who voted against it must have only done so because he’s somehow trying to usurp the power of the Biden administration.
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