After months of intensive negotiations behind closed doors, he decided not to agree to new climate measures. Many savage Democrats are no longer reluctant to vent their criticism of Manchin publicly. “He’s sabotaging what the Americans want, what a majority of the Democrats want,” a visibly furious Bernie Sanders, the progressive senator from Vermont, told ABC News on Sunday. “Deliberately torpedoing the president’s agenda.”
The world is literally on fire, Minnesota senator Tina Smith responded, “as he joins every Republican to stop effective measures.”
Because Democrats hold half the seats in the Senate, they need unanimous support from all party members to pass laws for which they cannot expect support from Republicans. Joe Manchin proves, over and over again, the biggest obstacle for Joe Biden to achieve his ambitions.
Manchin is known as — by Democratic standards — very conservative. As a senator from the coal state of West Virginia, he has little interest in green measures designed to combat climate change, such as special climate taxes for companies.
At the end of last year, Joe Manchin already gave the death blow to Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan, an extremely ambitious package of measures that would give the United States a more social and greener face. The plan fell through.
Slimmed down climate proposal
Still, the Democrats continued to talk to Manchin, hoping to get a much slimmed-down climate proposal through the Senate with its approval. Behind closed doors, an agreement seemed to have been reached at the end of last week, but late on Thursday evening Manchin said that he did not want to support additional climate taxes for companies, nor did he want to support 500 billion dollars to combat climate change.
His explanation: high inflation, now at 9.1 percent, is more important. “Inflation leads to many deaths,” Manchin told a radio station in West Virginia on Friday. ‘People can’t buy gas, they have trouble buying groceries.’
“This is a man who makes a lot of money from fossil fuels, a man who has received campaign contributions from 25 Republican billionaires,” Bernie Sanders told ABC News on Sunday. “In my humble opinion, Manchin represents the very wealthiest people in this country, not working families in West Virginia or America.”
Manchin has made millions from the coal industry in his state for years. Last year alone, it would have made him more than half a million dollars, three times his annual salary as a senator.
If the Senate does not act to tackle the climate crisis, Biden vowed to use his powers as president, he said Friday from Saudi Arabia. He didn’t explain how exactly.
Defeat of ‘greenest president’
The fact that Biden has again failed to convince Manchin is a huge defeat for the president who promised to become ‘the greenest ever’. Biden is caught between two worlds. His progressive supporters blame him for broken climate promises, partly because of the issuing of new drilling permits. Fossil and green simply don’t go together. The other side bears him the very high price of petrol, that he does not do enough against it. Both camps see failing leadership.
While Manchin has not yet fully turned its back on Democrats’ plans and wants to see it for a while, the White House climate team, which does not expect an agreement after a year of negotiations, is putting together a series of even smaller climate proposals that will reduce global warming. can counteract the earth. Even if they aren’t enough to meet Biden’s pledge to cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by about half by the end of this decade.
Something that especially young American voters are concerned about: they are becoming increasingly disappointed in the president. According to a poll by New York Times/Siena College wants 94 percent of voters under the age of 30 not to run for re-election in the 2024 election. Not because he’ll be 81, but because they think he’s underperforming.