Fuck Joe Manchin

Feels great to hate him. Feels right. Is right.

Photo by Al Drago-Pool/Getty Images

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This post was originally published on Defector on March 30, 2022.

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Fuck Joe Manchin. Fuck his coal-stained, asshole face, and fuck him not only still being in the Senate, but still alive in general. I can’t wait until the day he dies. I hope he lies in state in Charleston so that I can piss on his head. Look at this needy, directionless fuck, reveling once more in his ability to bend America to his bullshit.

Alex Bolton @alexanderbolton

Sen. Joe Manchin shoots down Biden's latest idea of 20 percent minimum tax on billionaires that would tax income & unrealized gains. "You can't tax something that's not earned — earned income is what we're based on," he says. "Unrealized gains is not the way to do it."

You know Manchin’s deal. You know he was put on Earth to say asinine shit like this and then, thanks to the gruesome bit of serendipity that has rendered him the biggest swing vote in the Senate, back it up with his now-patented brand of legislative obstinacy.

And we know that Manchin’s fetish for exercising his spiritual veto power over your life is more than just performance. Everyone knows he’s bought and paid for, but this week brought us a fresh reminder of that fact. Piggy-backing on a series of stories about Manchin’s corruption written by Daniel Boguslaw, New York Times reporters Christopher Flavelle and Julie Tate unearthed even more evidence showing how Manchin and his family reap a financial windfall through his blockage of key legislation, especially any legislation tied to improving the climate. This is because the bulk of Manchin’s income outside the Senate comes from a coal brokerage which does business with the Grant Town power plant in West Virginia. From the Times:

Mr. Manchin supplied a type of low-grade coal mixed with rock and clay known as “gob” that is typically cast aside as junk by mining companies but can be burned to produce electricity. In addition, he arranged to receive a slice of the revenue from electricity generated by the plant — electric bills paid by his constituents.

The deal inked decades ago has made Mr. Manchin, now 74, a rich man.

While the fact that Mr. Manchin owns a coal business is well-known, an examination by The New York Times offers a more detailed portrait of the degree to which Mr. Manchin’s business has been interwoven with his official actions. He created his business while a state lawmaker in anticipation of the Grant Town plant, which has been the sole customer for his gob for the past 20 years, according to federal data. At key moments over the years, Mr. Manchin used his political influence to benefit the plant. He urged a state official to approve its air pollution permit, pushed fellow lawmakers to support a tax credit that helped the plant, and worked behind the scenes to facilitate a rate increase that drove up revenue for the plant — and electricity costs for West Virginians.

Manchin’s company, which supplies the Grant Town plant with all that coal, is called Enersystems. According to the Times, the company currently has two employees, no website, and one client: the Grant Town power plant. Every decision Manchin makes—or stymies, to be more accurate—is with Grant Town in mind. Your town he could give a bare fuck about.

Hence, sociopathic profiteering is baked into this man’s very soul. It IS his character, and it renders him incapable, and uninterested, in doing his job with anything resembling decency. And no one, not even Joe Biden—as average of a President as you’ll ever find—is inclined to do much of anything about it. Manchin won’t be censured. He certainly won’t be impeached. Instead, the majority ruling party in this country has been all too content to let itself be held hostage by this man: the proudest Republican in the Democratic Party. This entitled pile of shit. This pathetic, destructive attention whore. This wannabe troop with Joe Theismann’s hair and half of Joe Theismann’s brain.

This is the guy running our country right now. This is the guy who gets off on making everyone jump and then complaining that they didn’t jump high enough. Everything that could be un-fucked in America right now remains fucked at this man’s behest. And what’s stopping him from doing even worse? I just watched Manchin—God, I even hate his fucking name—murder the Build Back Better bill when it was still in utero. Thanks to the reporters who continue to dig into Manchin’s business, you now know Manchin didn’t do this out of pure sadism, although I’m sure it plays a role in every decision he’s ever made. He fucked you for his own sake and no one else’s.

Biden’s bill had the potential to be the most dramatic expansion of the social safety net since FDR held office. Instead, Manchin forced the president to uncouple it from a smaller infrastructure bill so that he could let the rest of the plan die on the vine. And guess what? He succeeded. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called it last year when she voted against that piddly infrastructure bill (it passed by an overwhelming majority), but in the end Joe Manchin still got what he wanted. Which is nothing.

Manchin’s power is unearned not merely because he’s a ghoulish, unimaginative pig. He’s also is the beneficiary, in many ways the ideal beneficiary, of a government designed to work for his kind and his kind only. You can imagine a world in which your kids can go to preschool for free, your prescription and insurance costs go down, and the air you breathe is a little bit cleaner. But for that world to exist would require not just Manchin being blinked out of existence, but the undoing of a bicameral legislative system so irretrievably flawed that it allows, or even requires, this avaricious wastoid to run roughshod over every good idea that has a chance of passing through it. There is no escaping from Manchin’s tyranny because there is no escaping from the system that empowers him. That he’s such an insistent piece of shit only adds salt to the wound. But it’s an awful lot of salt.

If Manchin dropped dead tomorrow (fingers crossed!), his role would just fall to Arizona Senator and loyal Zenni customer Kyrsten Sinema. But where Sinema is just a mindless troll, Manchin loves nothing more than to add the veneer of nobility to his hateful business-doing. Thanks to him “caring” so much about our our super-scary deficit (as long as I have been alive, the U.S. has been in hock for trillions of dollars and it hasn’t mattered a whit), the Build Back Better bill now has virtually no chance of ever passing. Every time I read potentially good news about the Biden administration’s agenda in the paper, there’s always a But Manchin! paragraph halfway in that negates everything I read leading up to it. Every time I see the fucker’s name trending on Twitter, it’s because he’s found a new way to make the world worse; it’s like when Bill Maher trends every week, only it actually matters. Every time Manchin gets into some intimate negotiating session with Biden over a valuable bill, everyone but Manchin ends up losing.

You can say to me, Yeah Drew he sucks, but Republicans are worse. To that I say, no shit. I know that. I have all the evidence I need that the Republican party is a cancer on the world. Everyone has that evidence, which is why they turned out in droves in 2020—risking COVID-19!—to vote Biden into office and give the Senate to the Democrats. Think of the effort and expense that went into that election. People had to fight off a pandemic, massive voter-suppression efforts, corporate opposition, poisonous online propaganda, and so much more just to try and scratch out a small chance at improving their own lives. And what’s been their reward for all of that? This man:

In the middle of his second term as governor, Mr. Manchin handily won a special election in 2010 to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the death of Robert Byrd. From a seat on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Mr. Manchin had an ability to shape federal policy governing oil, gas and coal.

He became one of the most vocal opponents to the E.P.A.’s proposed limits on emissions of mercury and other hazardous substances from power plants. The mercury regulations, which eventually took effect, were particularly threatening to plants like Grant Town, because gob generates more mercury per kilowatt of electricity when burned than traditional coal, according to Lisa Evans, senior counsel at the environmental advocacy group Earthjustice.

Every time Joe Manchin opens his mouth I wanna nuke the moon. His mere existence ruins my day, and yours too. A lot of politicians hold that honor—Mitch McConnell chief among them—but Manchin has gone out of his way to make himself King Turd of Shit Mountain. He’s made the lives of every American, including those from his home state, worse. He’s a horrible person, and there’s no chance he takes that insult with any self-reflection. He’s proud to be a miserable fucker, and I hate him. Feels great to hate him. Feels right. Is right. I wish Joe Manchin nothing but awful things. I hope he gets eaten by a dog.