Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss Joe Manchin possibly leaving the Democratic Party and how it's basically ground Joe Biden's agenda to a halt. Why are Democrats so bad at this? To access the full-episode and support the pod, head on over to http://www.patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Hey, everybody. | |
| This is the Weekender Edition. | |
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| We appreciate you. | |
| I gotta tell you, just before we even get into this, I'm here, of course, with Nick Hausman. | |
| I've had a week. | |
| I've had a hell of a week. | |
| I'm ornery this week. | |
| I sliced up my thumb real bad. | |
| Dealing with that. | |
| On top of that, the American political climate, I know this is going to shock people, is in complete and utter free fall. | |
| It's entering an arena of madness that is both frightening, disturbing, but also completely irritating. | |
| Nick, we have to talk about the Democratic Party, We have to talk about Joe Manchin. | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| I'm sick of talking about his ass, too. | |
| I wish we didn't have to. | |
| But, Nick, he's going to leave the Democratic Party if they don't hold back aid to children and poor people. | |
| It's going to force him to leave the party. | |
| The thought of it is too much, Nick. | |
| It's too much! | |
| He's taking this ball and going home. | |
| He's taking his big ball of stupid coal and going home. | |
| Yeah, I mean, it's that typical, and I don't even know, what does that do for him anyway, really? | |
| I mean, he really should just go to the Republican Party, honestly, at this point. | |
| But the irony is, is that he has no sway there either. | |
| He's just another face in the crowd if he goes to the Republican Party, another awful asshole who doesn't want to help anybody. | |
| And frankly, I thought, you know, let's just primary him or whatever get him out of there in 2024 as it is, you know, anyway, but There is no this is like an empty threat. | |
| It feels like right like he's out of threats. | |
| He's out of ammunition And so he's left to say well, I'm gonna leave the party if you don't if you don't listen to me more or something I don't know. | |
| Oh, man, I have to tell you when this story came out and it was floated by David Korn over at Mother Jones and When this story started making the rounds, I've been expecting this for a while. | |
| I've been expecting Manchin to start flirting with the idea of possibly leaving the Democratic Party. | |
| And we'll talk more about what that would mean, what it would look like if he actually does it, and if it is an empty threat. | |
| But this is one more club in his golf bag, is what it is. | |
| And the truth is that he is telling the Democratic Party, I'm done with the party unless we shred the bills down to almost nothing, right? | |
| Unless you get rid of clean energy, because Joe Manchin, that man runs on dirty, dirty energy. | |
| And, you know, unless you take away basically any credit that is going to help people, that doesn't have to be means tested, that could create the so-called entitlement society, at which point he says that he would become an independent and who knows where it will happen from there. | |
| He, of course, told his Democratic associates, but also Joe Biden, which imagine that, by the way, going into the president of the United States of America's office. | |
| And telling him to his face, unless you kowtow to my demands, I'm going to leave the party. | |
| And I gotta tell you... | |
| The idea that you would do this in order to deprive people of aid and to do it to make sure that people's lives didn't get better, this is a special level of disgusting that he is doing right now. | |
| And again, I'm very hot over this and the whole situation, it just pisses me off to no end, Nick. | |
| It's crazy. | |
| Chris Murphy comes on and, you know, this is a negotiation, right? | |
| In theory. | |
| I mean, it's a hostage situation currently. | |
| Right. | |
| Because, you know, it's actually, yeah, somebody's treating this like a negotiation while someone else is treating it like a hostage situation. | |
| And that's why we're not getting on the same page, because, OK, like, you know, we want $3.5 trillion for this bill. | |
| That's okay. | |
| We'll start really high knowing that it'll probably get pared down anyway, right? | |
| So Chris Murphy comes on the news today and is now lobbying for that saying, well, listen, you know, if you asked me 10 years ago, if we were going to get one and a half trillion dollars for a special aid package for our constituents, that would be amazing. | |
| I would love to have that. | |
| And that's pretty much where we are now. | |
| So let's just take the one and a half trillion and call it a win. | |
| At this point, he might end up being right, but I don't even think it's going to be that high, right? | |
| It doesn't seem like Manchin is satisfied with that. | |
| Manchin isn't going to be satisfied until his constituents are eating sawdust and dirt. | |
| Let's just be real about that. | |
| And I have to tell you, we've got to get into... I hesitate to say strategy, Nick. | |
| You know, it's the only word that actually fits into this. | |
| But the strategy with which the Democratic Party entered into this entire situation, that's not the word. | |
| It's an absolute debacle on every front. | |
| And you're exactly right. | |
| $1.5 trillion in terms of investment in the past would have been seen as some sort of win. | |
| That's not the ballgame that has been created here. | |
| This moment right now is ugly. | |
| This is a really, really rough little, and I'll use a term our friends in the media love, it's a rough cycle right now. | |
| This is a tough little time for the Democratic Party and the people who supported them, and the people who, by the way, went out and worked for them. | |
| They wore their shoes out going door-to-door canvassing, writing postcards, volunteering for them. | |
| And all of the things that they got told that they were going to be out there trying to make happen are now just falling by the wayside as Captain Cole over here is just, you know, yelling like, no, you can't have more soup. | |
| No, you listen, you should probably get used to standing in food lines and be happy that we're even going to have food lines. | |
| And the Democratic Party at this point is not just held over a barrel by this guy, but they're negotiating down themselves. | |
| They have created a situation that is all set up to fail and it was as obvious as could be from the very beginning it was heading in this way and Joe Manchin, Joe Manchin is just doing what Joe Manchin would do. | |
| It's not a surprise that he is in this position. | |
| So why is that upsetting? | |
| Why is it that the Democrats aren't doing anything wrong? | |
| We knew this. | |
| The second they got control of the 50 senators and Biden wins, Manchin's name suddenly was the headline since January. | |
| Every day. | |
| Knowing that this was going to happen. | |
| I don't know what the strategy's supposed to be, because you have a guy who's severely compromised. | |
| And so, if that's the dirt that they somehow need to, like, do a... Some journalist needs to dig really deep and expose Manchin. | |
| I mean, we hear the things about his coal connections, but maybe there's a Pulitzer Prize behind this that will force him to be like, hey... Because, you know, maybe people in West Virginia finally would say, this guy is two-faced and not, you know, treating us the way he's supposed to be treated, because he simply wants to keep his money. | |
| I just saw some video they did on, you know, one of those things about the people in his family and how much fucking money they make on corns. | |
| Each one of them. | |
| It's crazy. | |
| His wife in him and then his kids. | |
| So he's severely compromised. | |
| Like, there isn't any way around that, and I don't know if the people of West Virginia care. | |
| Obviously they don't, because he has no pressure on him to do anything other than say, cut that out. | |
| But here's what's so frustrating. | |
| They cut it out. | |
| They said, fine, we'll take this huge initiative that's going to actually save the fucking planet, because you want to make more money. | |
| We'll die in a fiery apocalypse, Joe. | |
| Thank you. | |
| We'll take it. | |
| Yeah. | |
| It'll probably happen like after you die, like right after you die, so it's not gonna matter to you anyway. | |
| So we'll do it. | |
| But it's not enough! | |
| And by the way, the other thing was, they thought, okay, here was a strategy the Democrats had. | |
| Are you ready for this? | |
| They figured, okay, hey Joe, you go talk to your brothers over on the other side of the aisle. | |
| And you figure out a way to get a Voting Rights Act done. | |
| And if you can kind of get that done, that'll loosen things up for us to get this reconciliation bill done. | |
| And it'll be like, we'll get back to like norms. | |
| This is how we used to act in the Senate and all these things. | |
| And I mean, you know, how did that go, Jared? | |
| It didn't go well, is what I'll say. | |
| Not great, Bob. | |
| Not great, Bob. | |
| It's called retooling. | |
| And listen, it really upset me to watch my team get torn apart and the players sold off and traded away. | |
| I have to tell you, look at what we're dealing with now. | |
| This doesn't work. | |
| Having 50 Democrats in the Senate isn't going to get things passed. | |
| And I understand people are going to say, don't let perfect be the enemy of good. | |
| The problem with the Democratic Party for the longest time, and this goes back to everything that we've talked about from Bill Clinton to neoliberalism to the Democratic Party moving right, It has always been based on the idea of, we gotta go after that voter, that independent, right-leaning voter, and we can't do big, giant things. | |
| You have to start trying. | |
| This doesn't work. | |
| This is not, it's not conducive. | |
| And now we're hearing that Kyrsten Sinema might leave the Democratic Party. | |
| Good! | |
| Bye-bye! | |
| Take care! | |
| Don't write! | |
| We won't write you! | |
| Start finding people who can go into places like Arizona and West Virginia. | |
| Find you a candidate who can go into West Virginia and say, do you know why your lives suck right now? | |
| I'll give you public enemy number one, Joe Manchin. | |
| You have voted for him time and time again. | |
| Look what he does when he goes in. | |
| That's your investment that he's taking away. | |
| That's your life that he's making worse. | |
| They have to figure something out and you have to start having faith that something larger based on your principles can work. | |
| And unfortunately right now the party is completely controlled by the anxiety that these bigger projects cannot be popular. | |
| Right. | |
| Well, the other thing is by folding in this humongous bill all the things they want to do in the biggest wish list possible, you're guaranteeing, yeah, you're going to have these two people hold it hostage. | |
| But the key here isn't that, like, there's only a couple things that they don't want and then they're going to pair those up. | |
| It just doesn't sound like they want this bill, period. | |
| Cinema and mansion. | |
| Right? | |
| Like, there's just nothing you're going to get done. | |
| Even if it's $1.5 trillion, it's not going to get done. | |
| If it's $1 trillion, it's not going to get done. | |
| That seems to be what is going to happen here. | |
| And as a result, the time is going to run out and they're going to get screwed in the midterms. | |
| And then who knows what happens in 2024. | |
| You know, I have a feeling the Democrats encouraged him to start to get the Republicans on board for a Voting Rights Act bill, which they never were ever going to get on board with, even though most of the things in that bill, pared down, the Manchin version, are extremely popular with middle-of-the-road Republicans. | |
| All of this stuff is popular. | |
| All of it is popular. | |
| every single bit of it. | |
| So I think that the key here is that it's like the only way they're gonna get things through anyway was through breaking the filibuster anyway, right? | |
| And we knew he was never going to be on board with that. | |
| So I think the Democrats are hoping that by showing that the Republican Senate to a person that voted against this what was a reasonable bill for the voting rights, that that will prove to him that he has to break the filibuster when it comes time to do that because they're not going to negotiate in good faith. | |
| I I mean, but for me, Manchin doesn't seem like he's convinced from that. | |
| That's another backfire of some sort of strategy that the Democrats have. | |
| Absolutely, and like, take a look at where we're at right now. | |
| This is just a sampling of what Mansion and Cinema have now carved out, right? | |
| Of course, now clean energy has to go because, you know, Joe Mansion loves to roll around in some coal and some oil every now and then. | |
| We got to do means testing for limited aid, right, which ensures that the poorest and also people of color are not going to get a hold of that. | |
| As we talked about on the last episode, that is going to be limited to people making less than a cumulative $60,000 a year. | |
| So figure out how that's going to work. | |
| We also, by the way, found out over the past couple of days that the Democrats are now discussing not actually raising taxes on the wealthy in order to pay for any of this. | |
| So that effectively kneecaps all of it. | |
| And then a fun thing, and I think this is instructive, and I think this is something that our listeners and anybody who looks at all this needs to really take a long and curious glance at. | |
| So it has now come out that this idea that funding community college, like tuition-free community college, that that's not going to happen, that's been kicked out of the bill, right? | |
| That is now not even on the table anymore. | |
| I want to remind people that back when the primaries were going on for the Democratic nomination, the argument wasn't community college. | |
| The question was whether or not you would have tuition-free public university or tuition-free community college. | |
| Well, what did the Democrats do? | |
| They fought amongst themselves. | |
| They negotiated amongst themselves. | |
| They said, no, we can't do university, right? | |
| We can't do tuition free public university. | |
| We have to do community college. | |
| So what happens when this bill is introduced into the Senate? | |
| Joe Manchin says, no, not community college. | |
| If you would have started with public universities, you might have very well have seen it go down to community college. | |
| So the Democrats have done this time and time again. | |
| They get in their own way, and we've seen this happen since the Clinton administration. | |
| They have constantly kneecapped their own efforts to afford any type of agenda that they believe in because they're terrified So that's what's fascinating to me is you gotta look at it from the other side. | |
| who would accept tuition free college? | |
| Everybody. - Right. - Everybody. - So that's what's fascinating to me is, you gotta look at it from the other side. | |
| What is the motivation to oppose that kind of measure? | |
| Or the myriad other measures that clearly are designed, now of course it's like, well it's waste. | |
| You know, it's all gonna be wasted money We're going to all my hard-earned money is going to go to nothing because it's going to not go to the right place. | |
| I suppose that's what he's arguing. | |
| But certainly with like Community College that at least is a pipeline that's clear. | |
| It can go to the school people can enroll. | |
| I mean, What it sounds like they're saying is that we don't want people to better themselves. | |
| We don't want people to have an opportunity to go to college like we did with the GI Bill after World War II. | |
| That's what it sounds like. | |
| And I don't know how else you can argue that point. | |
| And by the way, I would wish that the Democrats would frame it that way against the Republicans, and they don't. | |
| Yeah, and they've constantly failed on this front. | |
| And part of the problem, and this boils down to what we have to talk about, The Democrats have no idea how to communicate what they believe in. | |
| That's been the problem for decades right now. | |
| And listen, we've told our listeners before, we're not a partisan podcast. | |
| I think we both have ideologies. | |
| We both have things that we believe in. | |
| I think we're both leftists, so to speak. | |
| I'm not going to sit here and I'm not going to carry water for Joe Biden simply because he's a Democrat. | |
| We need to talk about this. | |
| So far, and his numbers are slipping. | |
| They really are. | |
| They're in danger right now. | |
| His approval rating on PIE 38 is 43.7. | |
| All of these polls are showing around the 40s. | |
| And listen, polls are polls, but I have to tell you, the reason why his numbers are going down, it isn't just COVID. | |
| It's the fact that he told people the reason that he should be president is because he was a longtime veteran of the Senate, and he was going to make sure that things worked in the Senate. | |
| Well, guess what? | |
| There's a fire where he used to live, and he doesn't have any control over it. | |
| He hasn't been out there. | |
| I'm sorry, he's not really selling this to the public. | |
| He's not creating any momentum for it. | |
| The de facto president right now is Joe Manchin. | |
| That's what's happened right now. | |
| What the Democrats have to do, and by the way, you can sit here and praise Barack Obama all that you want. | |
| One of the bigger problems of Barack Obama's administration is that he was afraid to tell the people what he was doing and what he had done. | |
| You have to communicate to people what your programs are, what your mission is, what your agenda is. | |
| You have to get out, you have to sell it, and then when you do it, you have to explain to people what has been done. | |
| The narrative in this country has changed. | |
| to the fact that this presidency, quote unquote, is floundering. | |
| And it's because they're not out in front of this, because Democrats are terrified to talk about any investment in any sort of program that can make lives better. | |
| Because, Nick, I know, listen, I hope you're sitting down. | |
| I hope the people listening at home, I hope that they're not driving. | |
| I hope you're not handling explosive chemicals or flammable materials. | |
| Because the moment that they talk about what they actually believe in and what they want to get done, They're gonna get called a socialist and communist and they're terrified of it and they've been terrified of it for decades and they lack the ability to actually communicate this stuff. | |
| Well, I would argue that at least in 2008 they weren't so terrified and they were able to pass the Obamacare. | |
| I agree. | |
| Well, they have the numbers. | |
| Right, and they had a majority-proof Senate. | |
| But here's the thing, what happened out of that? | |
| So I would almost argue that there was a falling out of this whole period, and then as soon as 2010 hit and the Tea Party hit, we're in the throes of the fear of that, which is just ruder than that. | |
| So thanks, Obama. | |
| But meanwhile, I don't, you're right, I think the problem with that Biden's having is that he's not out there, right? | |
| They're kind of hiding him a little bit. | |
| He's not doing too many of the press conferences or, you know, city hall, not city halls, what are they called? | |
| Town halls. | |
| He's doing one tonight. | |
| Oh, go figure. | |
| Yeah, he's doing one tonight and like, Godspeed, I hope you're able to communicate this stuff, but it's actually, do you feel sometimes, and I'd be interested to hear your take on this, Trump was in our lives every second of every day. | |
| You could not escape Donald Trump as President of the United States. | |
| God help us. | |
| There was no ability. | |
| It feels like, in part, the reaction has been like, just get Joe Biden away from the people. | |
| Just let him breathe. | |
| Let them think there's somebody in charge at the wheel and doing all this stuff. | |
| But the problem is that the environment that Trump thrived in, and I think sort of ushered in and amplified, That any vacuum is immediately filled by either people who are acting in bad faith, spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories, or Joe Manchin, who by the way at this point has blown up like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man on attention and hot air. | |
| Like it feels like Biden has left a vacuum for other people to fill. | |
| Absolutely terrific point. | |
| The vacuum was bad. | |
| You know, it's not enough to be stable and reliable and just sort of back to norms or whatever. | |
| No, you need to fill that. | |
| And it was even like what Cuomo was doing with his daily reports on COVID, right? | |
| There was something about that that was reassuring until... | |
| Until it wasn't. | |
| - No, it wasn't. - Yeah, so you're right. | |
| And I don't know if Biden's up for that. | |
| That's the other problem, right? | |
| Like it certainly leads to a lot more of this accusations of him not having dementia. | |
| Everything that clearly Trump has, they can just now accuse Biden of. | |
| And there's not a lot of other evidence to refute that. | |
| And it's really frustrating. - And you've been listening to a free preview of our Patreon exclusive weekender show. | |
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