The best retort is that Democrats do not really have working legislative control of the Senate anyway. While Manchin and Sinema have occasionally roused themselves out of torpor to vote for things like the Bipartisan Infrastructure package, their votes have been needed on only a few important occasions — like the COVID relief bill from March 2021 and the 50-50 votes to make appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. You can throw in the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Jackson Brown, too, even though she got two Republican votes, since McConnell would have probably invented some kind of “no confirmations in the spring before a midterm election year” rule to prevent even giving her a committee hearing.
Are those achievements sufficient to justify the extraordinary amount of damage that has been done to the Democratic brand over the past year, almost all of it inflicted by Manchin and Sinema on their own party? Considering that Jackson will get outvoted 6-3 or 5-4 for the next 20 years, that the electoral glow from the American Rescue Plan faded months ago, and that the single most important piece of it — increasing the child tax credit and turning it into an automatic monthly payment — was allowed to expire by these same Democrats, I would argue no.
It air-fries my blood just gazing at the list of missed opportunities to transform America into a more equitable and livable country. Here is a partial list of things that have not happened almost exclusively because of Manchin and/or Sinema’s opposition: a federal minimum wage hike; an extension of the Child Tax Credit payments; paid family and medical leave; D.C. statehood; voting rights protections; a ban on partisan gerrymandering; universal pre-K and subsidized daycare; and investments in encouraging adoption of clean energy technologies and electric vehicles.
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