Home-State Protestors Confront Manchin For Sabotaging Democrats

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Protesters turned out in West Virginia over the weekend to express opposition to stances taken by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a member of the slim Democratic majority in the Senate. Demonstrations apparently took place at locations including a Manchin office in the state and the coal-fired Grant Town Power Plant, where activists including the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II pushed for the Democratic Senator to cease his de facto blockade of Democratic initiatives including increasing cleaner energy usage. As activist Kai Newkirk proclaimed it on Saturday, “We are gathered with [Barber] and the [Poor People’s Campaign] at Joe Manchin’s office in Martinsburg, WV to call on him to repent of his greed and embrace justice. No more corruption! End the filibuster, pass a living wage, protect voting rights, heal the climate!”

Assuming no Republican support, Manchin’s backing is necessary for the passage of legislation in the Senate regardless of the filibuster rules, because even though Democrats have a majority, not a single vote can be lost. The chamber is split 50-50, and Democrats are in control because of Vice President Kamala Harris’s role as a tiebreaker. Besides the energy policy concerns, the Associated Press says protesters “also urged Manchin to support legislation to lift up families living in poverty. The protest also focused on Manchin’s family business, which sells waste coal to the power plant about 90 miles (about 145 kilometers) south of Pittsburgh.” That family business operation could present a conflict of interest for Manchin when dealing with energy policy. Barber, meanwhile, remarked in part as follows amid the protests last weekend:

‘Instead of passing legislation and standing with those things that would help the climate and protect our water, [Manchin] has blocked those things… At every turn, he has chosen the money and chosen greed and chosen a kind of political meanness. When you block health care, people die. When you mess up the climate, people die.’

Arrests of protesters around the power plant apparently took place; WV Rising, a group among those responsible for weekend demonstrations, indicated that 16 people were apprehended. Manchin, meanwhile, has also stood in the way of passing new voting rights protections. When Democrats attempted to alter filibuster rules in the Senate in order to pass such protections, just two Democrats — Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema — voted against the proposed change, even as Republicans across the country continue to enact essentially pointless measures restricting the vote. Recently, voting rights advocates scored a significant — albeit limited — victory with a federal ruling against key provisions of a Florida law that put new restrictions around the usage of drop boxes for mail-in ballots, among other things. The new rules, which were among those struck down by the judge (although appeals quickly seemed possible), would have curtailed when and how these boxes could be available in most cases, despite no evidence of widespread election fraud.