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Joseph Manchin III (born August 24, 1947) is an American politician and businessman serving as the senior United States senator from West Virginia, a seat he has held since 2010. Originally a Democrat, he was the 34th governor of West Virginia from 2005 to 2010 and the 27th secretary of state of West Virginia from 2001 to 2005. Manchin called himself a "moderate conservative Democrat" and was often cited as the most conservative Democrat in the Senate; he registered as an independent in 2024. Despite his previous party affiliation, he supported many policies by President Donald Trump and opposed many policies by Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. After the 2020 elections, in which the Senate was split 50-50 with Vice President Kamala Harris as a tiebreaker, Manchin gained attention as his vote was required to pass legislation with only Democratic support. Manchin announced that he would retire after his current term.
Quotes
- The most hypocritical thing I've ever seen done to a human being, and then they have enough guts to sit on the floor, watch him give his speech, and go over and hug him? That's hypocrisy at the highest level I've ever seen in my life.
- U.S. Senator Joe Manchin on Senate Democrats who called for Franken's resignation, in "What if Al Franken unresigns?" in The Week (20 December 2017)
- Good News: The draft Democratic appropriations bills include many #WV priorities that I fought for including water and wastewater upgrades, healthcare and education investments, and transportation projects & economic development opportunities for WV. MORE:
- Twitter (October 18, 2021)
- President Biden's framework is the product of months of negotiations and input from all members of the Democratic Party who share a common goal to deliver for the American people.
- As we work through the text of the legislation I would hope all of us will continue to deal in good faith and do what is right for the future of the American people
- @LonelyPlanet has ranked #WV as one of the top 10 regions in the WORLD to visit in 2022! Bring your friends & family and experience #AlmostHeaven West Virginia - you might just want to stay.
- Twitter (October 30, 2021)
- We are praying for Senator Rounds, their children and grandchildren, and the entire state of South Dakota as they mourn the loss of a magnificent First Lady of South Dakota.
- Twitter (November 2, 2021)
- Nancy Pelosi is very capable, I know her, I get along fine with her, we maybe just come from different parts of the country...
- interview with Brett Baier (Nov 3, 2021) a lengthy interview on YouTube
- I believe in President Biden
- We just have to work together. We can't go too far left. This is not a center-left or a left country. We are a center, if anything, center-right country
- I'm fiscally responsible and socially compassionate
- "Manchin says Democrats 'can't go too far left'" (November 4, 2021)
- #ICYMI: The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill has passed the House and is now on the way to the President’s desk! Our bipartisan bill will help WV & the nation address infrastructure needs while creating good-paying jobs and growing the economy. MORE:
- President Biden's framework is the product of months of negotiations and input from all members of the Democratic Party who share a common goal to deliver for the American people.
- As we work through the text of the legislation I would hope all of us will continue to deal in good faith and do what is right for the future of the American people
- The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill represents a historic investment in West Virginia’s infrastructure – around $6 billion over the next 5 years. Here are some of the investments that the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill will bring to WV:
- Thanks to the #AmericanRescuePlan, nearly $124 MILLION in relief is on the way to 440 #WV healthcare providers. I fought for dedicated funding for rural healthcare providers in the ARP to ensure they can continue to provide critical care in our communities
- The filibuster is the only protection we have in democracy. I’m not going to comment on a leak from the Supreme Court.
- Collins, Manchin and other lawmakers react to the Supreme Court draft opinion (Updated: 05/03/2022 03:11 PM EDT)
- never voted for — nor do I support — such a ban [on abortion ]
- I trusted Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh when they testified under oath that they also believed Roe v. Wade was settled legal precedent and I am alarmed they chose to reject the stability the ruling has provided for two generations of Americans.
- Via twitter, as quoted in Manchin ‘alarmed’ by Kavanaugh, Gorsuch’s votes on Roe (24 June 2022)
Quotes about Manchin
2023
- the coal-baron senator Joe Manchin
- Rebecca Solnit Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility (2023)
2022
- these people who own fossil fuels are powerful players in our political world. Until recently, ExxonMobil was the biggest company on Earth. Entire nations - Russia or Saudi Arabia, say - are essentially petro-states, deriving most of their revenue and power from hydrocarbons. The biggest political donors in American history, the Koch brothers, were also the country's biggest oil and gas barons; United States Senator Joe Manchin, who has taken more political donations from the fossil fuel industry than anyone else in Washington and personally has millions invested in coal, was single-handedly able to rewrite climate legislation in 2021.
- Bill McKibben in The Climate Book edited by Greta Thunberg (2022)
- He didn’t abruptly do anything,” Sanders interjected during a Sunday appearance on ABC’s This Week. “He has sabotaged the president’s agenda. … Six months ago, I made it clear that you have people like Manchin — [and] Sinema, to a lesser degree — who are intentionally sabotaging the president’s agenda, what the American people want, what a majority of us in the Democratic caucus want. Nothing new about this”...Sanders added, “The problem was that we continued to talk to Manchin like he was serious; he was not. This is a guy who’s a major recipient of fossil fuel money, a guy who has received campaign contributions from 25 Republican billionaires.” Responding to a Manchin quote about inflation and how it affects his West Virginia constituents, Sanders argued that it’s “the same nonsense Manchin has been talking about for a year” and pointed out that Manchin’s state is one of the poorest in the nation. “You ask the people of West Virginia whether they want to expand Medicare to cover dental, hearing, and eyeglasses. You ask the people of West Virginia whether we should demand that the wealthiest people and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes. Ask the people of West Virginia whether or not all people should have health care as a human right like in every other country on Earth. That’s what they will say.” He concluded, “In my humble opinion, Manchin represents the very wealthiest people in this country, not working families in West Virginia or America.”
- Bernie Sanders July 17, 2022 interview quoted here
- West Virginia is the sixth poorest state in the United States of America and Manchin is pretending like he's helping them. But this is not about the makeup of the state. Look at the polling, even West Virginians agree with a lot of what is both of these bills. This is really about Manchin being bought and sold and choosing the owner-donor class over his constituents. He's not doing the will of the people and neither is Sinema.
- Nina Turner, 2022 Interview with Common Dreams (2022)
2021
- Sanders' remarks on the NDAA—which cleared a key procedural hurdle late Wednesday—came as Democrats in Congress also worked to finalize the Build Back Better Act, a reconciliation package whose social spending and climate provisions have been gutted to satisfy right-wing members of the majority party such as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). Manchin, a key swing vote in the Senate, has repeatedly cited the national debt as a reason to pare back the reconciliation bill, which now has a top-line price tag of around $1.75 trillion over ten years—roughly half of the original $3.5 trillion framework. But while the West Virginia Democrat says he's alarmed by the prospect of spending to expand Medicare and combat the climate crisis, he appears unconcerned that, over the past decade, Congress has poured over $9 trillion into the only federal agency that has yet to pass a full independent audit. Manchin has approved every NDAA since 2011, and he voted Wednesday to advance the 2022 Pentagon budget.
- While Biden repeatedly vowed to address the climate crisis, his climate agenda was dealt a major setback back in Washington, D.C., when Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia criticized the slimmed-down $1.75 trillion Build Back Plan to address the climate crisis and to expand the nation’s social safety net. The plan will only pass the Senate if Manchin and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema come around to support it. It was interesting Senator Manchin used Biden’s moment in Glasgow to hold his own news conference in Washington, D.C., to say, well, he’s weighing whether to support the Build Back Better Act...
Some have said... that Senator Manchin has to decide whether he wants to be a senator or a lobbyist or maybe a Republican.
- Manchin is the perfect example of how Big Oil works. He’s taken more money than any other senator from the fossil fuel industry...
There was that sting videotape released a couple of weeks ago where Exxon’s chief lobbyist reported talking to him every week and calling him their “kingmaker.” There was a report yesterday that Manchin spent part of September huddled with all the leading coal barons at a golf resort someplace, where they played a Civil War - themed golf tournament in between speeches.
- Manchin and Sinema are effectively acting like 21st Century-style "Dixiecrats" of the '50s ad '60s, segregationist Democrats such as James Eastland, Robert Byrd (Manchin's mentor) and George Wallace. The Dixiecrats' were committed to racial segregation and white supremacy...The question is whether faced with the potential defeat of historic civil rights legislation due to their opposition to filibuster reform, are Sinema and Manchin willing to go down in history as the Strom Thurmonds, George Wallaces, and yes, Robert Byrds of the 21st century, who stood in the classroom doors to block integration and for years filibustered civil rights laws. Will they want to face headlines like "Two Democratic Dissenters Manchin and Sinema Join Republicans in Blocking Filibuster Reform That Would Allow Majority Passage of Civil Rights Laws." Are Sinema and Manchin willing to face the outrage of the grassroots activists who helped get them elected and who are ready to cash in their chips and mobilize a mass movement to get these two Senators to change their positions? Sinema may be particularly susceptible to grassroots pressure, since her narrow win was powered in large part by organizing from unions and Latino activists. And if Sinema flips, would Manchin be willing to be the lone Democrat allowing Republicans to block historic civil rights legislation? Sinema's and Manchin's decisions may well determine whether America remains a democracy or whether it's indefinitely distorted by minority rule.
- Miles Mogulescu, Article in CommonDreams (2/19/2021)
- President Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress are facing a crisis as the popular domestic agenda they ran on in the 2020 elections is held hostage by two corporate Democratic senators: fossil-fuel consigliere Joe Manchin and payday-lender favorite Kyrsten Sinema. But the very week before the Democrats’ $350-billion annual domestic package hit this wall of corporate money-bags, all but 38 House Democrats voted to hand over more than double that amount to the Pentagon. Senator Manchin has hypocritically described the domestic spending bill as “fiscal insanity,” but he has voted for a much larger Pentagon budget every year since 2016. Real fiscal insanity is what Congress does year after year, taking most of its discretionary spending off the table and handing it over to the Pentagon before even considering the country’s urgent domestic needs.
- And this is a genuine crisis for America because if President Biden is frustrated in his attempt to pass his Build Back Better legislation (that is overwhelmingly supported by Americans across the political spectrum) — all because business groups, giant corporations and rightwing billionaires are asserting ownership over their two “made” senators — there’s a very good chance that today’s cynicism and political violence is just a preview of the rest of the decade. But this isn’t as much a story about Kyrsten Sinema as it is about today’s larger political dysfunction for which she’s become, along with Joe Manchin, a poster child. Increasingly, because of the Supreme Court’s betrayal of American values, it’s become impossible for people like the younger Sinema to rise from social worker to the United States Senate without big money behind them.... While the naked corruption of Sinema and Joe Manchin is a source of outrage for Democrats across America, what’s far more important is that it reveals how deep the rot of money in American politics has gone, thanks entirely to a corrupted Supreme Court. In Justice Stevens’ dissent in Citizens United, he pointed out that corporations in their modern form didn’t even exist when the Constitution was written...
- Thom Hartmann in Krysten Sinema is the Epitome of Political Corruption, Thom Hartmann, CounterPunch, October 14, 2021
- The For the People Act would help more Americans retain their voting rights, while the companion John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore and strengthen the federal oversight provisions stripped out of the 1965 Voting Rights Act by the 2013 Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder. The Brennan Center has advocated the passage of both bills... Both bills have passed in the U.S. House of Representatives, only to have been stalled in the Senate by U.S. Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, both Democrats.
2018
- The fact that after millions of people across the country cast their votes that our political system is basically controlled by Joe Manchin of WV and Susan Collins of Maine makes no fucking sense.
- Waleed Shahid on Twitter (9/28/2018)
2017
- On every issue that truly mattered to West Virginia — such as opposing Hillary, Obama, cap & trade, Planned Parenthood, and higher taxes— Joe Manchin pretended to stand with West Virginians, but then voted with Chuck Schumer and the liberal D.C. Democratic leadership. Joe Manchin is a classic ‘say one thing do another’ politician.
See also
External links
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