The West Virginia senator put the kibosh on the Build Back Better bill, and with it pretty much all the legislative priorities of the White House. Manchin didn’t just derail the President’s legislative agenda; he also kept Biden from using another suite of powers that belong to the executive alone. Think about climate change: the Biden Administration, which ran on a promise to stop new leases for oil and gas on public lands, just last month approved the largest offshore lease deal in history. The Administration claimed publicly that a court decision had forced its hand, but an earlier memo indicates that officials didn’t really believe that. More likely, they feared upsetting Manchin. Similarly, the Administration has refused to review the Line 3 tar-sands pipeline across Minnesota. The only logical explanation for not blocking Line 3 is a need to appease Joe Manchin, who has taken to calling for a revival of Keystone. That need to appease is gone now.
By Bill McKibben. New Yorker. December 20, 2021.
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