POLITICS
Joe Manchin Defined 2021
Three reasons why West Virginia’s senior senator has been so important
West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin is not the world’s richest person (though he’s doing just fine). Manchin did not host Saturday Night Live this year. Manchin is not being personally blamed for worsening light pollution and interfering with astronomers’ measurements. And his car company is not under investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. But unlike TIME Magazine’s “person of the year” Elon Musk, to whom all of the above applies, U.S. public policy this year hinged on Manchin.
With Democrats maintaining a Senate majority only by virtue of also holding the White House, and thus Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote, the party typically needs everyone on board. That means they need Manchin.
But it also means the party needs every other Democratic senator. As Samuel Workman noted at the beginning of the year, when Joe Manchin has voted against a majority of Senate Democrats he usually hasn’t been the only one. Manchin has supported the vast majority of Biden nominees, and the nominees he has publicly opposed — like Neera Tanden as OMB director and Saule Omarova as Comptroller of the Currency — faced opposition from other Democrats as well.
Joe Manchin also voted to convict Donald Trump of his impeachment charges even after Trump received more than 68% of West Virginia’s popular vote in the 2020 election and called Republicans voting against a bipartisan commission to investigate the events of January 6, 2021 a “betrayal of the oath we each take.” Manchin is in sync with his party on a wide array of non-legislative questions.
Manchin vote largely has been pivotal in the legislative process amid the Biden administration’s attempt to enact two major policy changes, one on infrastructure and one on social policy.
Why is Manchin to influential?
The answer is partly institutional. Senate debate rules — or rather, the lack of debate rules — means each individual senator can have a lot of influence over what does or does not get debated on the floor. That power has existed as long as the Senate has, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that senators started engaging in what Barbara Sinclair called “unrestrained activism” in the Senate floor. That shift occurred because of an increased workload but also because of changes to Washington’s policy community more broadly and how the media covered Congress, its activities, and its members.
A second reason Manchin is so influential, then, is because the media portrays him that way. According to voteview.com, Manchin has voted with his party 94 percent of the time so far this year. Although fairly high, that’s the lowest party unity score among Senate Democrats. Conflict, whether between or within parties, tends to receive more media coverage. Focusing on Manchin as a pivotal vote or the senator responsible for “blocking Joe Biden’s agenda” gives readers a hook for stories about the Senate legislative process, but it also misses some key elements of Democratic party dynamics.
Political scientists who study Congress often use scores called DW-NOMINATE to track where we can divide the coalitions voting yea or nay on a bill; some refer to this as ideology, though that’s a point of some contention. Regardless, the folks who devised DW-NOMINATE found that most votes can be explained by a single dimension that refers to economic and redistributive policy issues. And (again, from voteview.com which calculates and tracks the DW-NOMINATE scores) on that first dimension, Joe Manchin is indeed the most “conservative” Democratic senator.
But sometimes we need a second dimension to explain how legislators vote, and on that second dimension there are three Democrats who grade out as more “conservative” than Manchin in the current Congress: Georgia’s two senators and Arizona’s Mark Kelly. A media focus on the issues where Manchin is most at odds with his party — and not the issues where, say, Jon Ossoff is most at odds with other Democrats — helps build Manchin’s reputation as the critical “50th vote.”
Finally, Manchin’s vote has been so important because Senate Democrats want it to be. Chuck Schumer and other Senate Democratic leaders chose to try to pass their social policy legislation through the budget reconciliation process which only requires a simple majority vote, which in the face of large-scale unified Republican opposition means they need every Democrat and Independent on board, including Manchin. Democrats also have made overtures to Manchin about the potential for eliminating the filibuster for legislation, describing how he would be “the most powerful person” in a Senate where a supermajority was not required to overcome opposition.
True, Senate Democrats want Manchin’s vote to be pivotal because the alternative is someone like Lindsey Graham or one of North Dakota’s two Republican senators. But the choice to elevate Manchin as the keystone of the Democratic agenda still has been a choice. And that choice has defined the U.S. policy process for much of 2021.
