Republicans received an early Christmas present on Sunday, December 19. The delivery man is a Democratic senator, Joe Manchin, who thus opens a deep crisis within his own party and deals a severe blow to the Biden presidency.
While the president spent his weekend in Wilmington, Delaware, Joe Manchin was the morning guest on Fox News. A symbolic conservative forum, to announce that he would definitely oppose the Build Back Better (BBB) plan, the major legislative project for social spending and investment in the green economy, adopted in the House representatives on November 19. Due to the division of the Senate 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats, thanks to the voice of Vice-President Kamala Harris, no voice should be missing from the majority side to pass a text.
“I tried everything that was humanly possible, I can’t do it”, explained the elected official of West Virginia. Recalling that he had reservations “For five and a half months” on the text, Joe Manchin has multiplied the explanations to justify this twist, to the point of weakening his own argument.
He cited inflation, the new variant of the coronavirus, which should be focused on, or global geopolitical instability. Then he repeated the exercise in writing, in a press release issued in the wake. “My fellow Democrats in Washington are determined to reshape our society in a radical way that would leave our country even more vulnerable to the threats we face,” we read there. I can’t take this risk with a staggering debt of over $ 29 trillion [de dollars] and inflation numbers that are real and hurt every hard working American, at the pumps, in grocery stores and on utility bills [gaz et électricité], with no end in sight. “
A text qualified as a “mammoth”
These explanations did not convince anyone in the White House, warned only twenty minutes before the interview on Fox News by a simple assistant to the senator, according to the American press. Well-versed in complex negotiations in Congress, Joe Biden was the chief manager of the Manchin case. Without ever twisting his arm in public, increasing the gestures of attention, he hoped to push him to a compromise. The Democratic president had even convinced the progressive wing of the party – that is to say a hundred elected in the Chamber – to vote in priority the bill on the infrastructures (1,200 billion dollars, that is more than 1 trillion euros ), finally signed by Joe Biden on November 15.
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