Come on, man. You bought Joe Biden’s effluvium on deficit reduction after more than a year of his fronting the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and the $5.5 trillion-plus Build Back Better proposal. You stood by while Biden signed an EO imposing onerous costs and regulatory red tape on energy exploration and production.

Now you want us to believe that you’re shocked, shocked that Joe Biden didn’t take deficit reduction and domestic energy? And that Biden isn’t anything more than partisan demagogue?  Apparently so:

When President Biden and I spoke before Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act last summer, we agreed that the bill was designed to pay down our national debt and shore up America’s energy security. It was designed to generate $738 billion in new revenue, with more than $238 billion dedicated to debt reduction, the first serious piece of legislation in more than two decades that the Congressional Budget Office estimated would have done that.

Yet instead of implementing the law as intended, unelected ideologues, bureaucrats and appointees seem determined to violate and subvert the law to advance a partisan agenda that ignores both energy and fiscal security. Specifically, they are ignoring the law’s intent to support and expand fossil energy and are redefining “domestic energy” to increase clean-energy spending to potentially deficit-breaking levels. The administration is attempting at every turn to implement the bill it wanted, not the bill Congress actually passed. Ignoring the debt and deficit implications of these actions as the time nears to raise the debt ceiling isn’t only wrong, it’s policy and political malpractice.

“Bureaucrats and appointees,” eh? Well, who appointed them? Who sets the policies that appointees implement? Wouldn’t that be the same man who celebrated Manchin’s support for the IRA and “deficit reduction” by announcing a massive half-trillion-dollar off-budget plan to bail out Academia through student loan debt cancellation? Biden did that in the same month, in fact.

What game is Manchin playing here? He seems reluctant to criticize Biden directly, and isn’t actually proposing anything new either. Manchin wants to distance himself from the administration he enabled with the Inflation Reduction Act, and really wants to distance himself from its results, but that’s impossible. The vote on the IRA came down to Manchin; Manchin negotiated its terms; and Manchin endorsed its policies and the lack of control the legislation had on Biden’s use of the bill.

If Manchin wants to talk about “political malpractice,” maybe he should look in the mirror.

But Manchin didn’t commit political malpractice either … not really. He endorsed the IRA not for its deficit reduction but for its attempt to stave off a seat reduction in the House and Senate. Biden and Democrats needed a legislative win to rally their base in the midterms. Manchin sold out on deficit and inflation control to give it to them. Now he’s in position to call in some chits in 2024, when he’ll either run for the Senate again or maybe take aim at another term as governor in deep-red West Virginia.

And this WSJ op-ed is part of that strategy, too. Manchin has spent all year attempting to distance himself from a highly unpopular president and the even-more unpopular Chuck Schumer. He wants to run again as a flinty independent rather than the Biden-Schumer enabler Manchin was last year. It’s a dodge, a con on West Virginia voters, and this time so threadbare that Manchin may be the only one buying it any longer.

That makes it fit perfectly into the long and ‘distinguished’ roll of Captain Louis Renault Award winners. Let’s hope Mountain State voters present Joe Manchin with his “winnings” in November 2024, no matter which office he chooses for his next election.