Manchin and Sinema, a Combination That Serves Itself Before the People – Solidarity America

Manchin is quite transparent. As a multi-millionaire, he is trying to protect his assets and his wealth, most of which is built on coal, a dirty fossil fuel. Sinema is protecting the assets and wealth of her donors in the banking and pharmaceutical industries. She does not express support for any of the programs that the Biden plan seeks: expanded Medicare benefits (new dental, eye, and hearing benefits), two years of tuition-free community college, improved housing and home health care benefits and increased efforts to address climate change and global heating by encouraging clean energy. If she does support these issues, she doesn’t discuss them with anyone or advocate for them, except possibly with her corporate donors.

While politicians are a usually slippery lot, Sinema is no slouch at that and knows how to work the press, staying in the spotlight for her short time of fame and celebrity. She does have a GOP counterpart in Marjorie Taylor (MT or “Empty”) Greene, a member of the House of Representatives from a backwater of Georgia, who also knows how to work the press, only her modus operandi is outrageous statements and loud public confrontations with Democrats. On one occasion, she followed and harassed on the street a survivor of a deadly school shooting, saying that he was a coward for walking away from her. No one would say that Sinema is the exact equivalent of Greene, after all, she has a Ph.D. Degree, but that does not confer common sense or a sense of decency on a doctoral candidate.

Not all of the press is playing the Manchin-Sinema game, however, with The Guardian weighing in on Oct. 3, quoting New York magazine’s phrase “for the oversized power resting in the hands of the two otherwise unremarkable Democratic holdouts: Manchema.” Writing in that magazine, Sarah Jones, said, “They are, in effect, holding the president’s priorities hostage to their personal whims…That is not a new story in politics. But their stubbornness in the face of contemporary challenges reveals the bottomless emptiness of their brand of centrist politics.”

The pair are not “centrists.” They are betraying the untold number of working-class citizens who gave them their votes, thinking that their needs would be represented in the Congress. Instead, the two have been representing the needs of two people: Manchin and Sinema. If greed were a state, that’s what they would be representing on the national stage…for money and power.

Manchin, a coal baron, has told his constituents, the people of West Virginia, that he is their champion since he is “one of them.” His actions say otherwise and the people of his state might show him the door. Sinema already is facing the ire of the progressive and liberal Democrats in Arizona. She may believe that things are fine and that she will be reelected. The polls say otherwise and she won’t be able to imagine herself out of her political troubles.

Sinema seems to think that her erratic and quirky behavior is playing well with her constituents and Democrats across the nation, in general. That kind of behavior may be welcome on a reality television show, but the stage on which she is performing is not primetime television. It is the real world and what she is doing by playing the Republican game is further hurting working-class and minority citizens who are already hurting. She needs to stop trying to play the part of the Democratic Empty Greene and start voting to help Americans in dire need.