As the world faces crisis upon crisis, The 73-year-old Joe Manchin is the quintessential renegade Democrat: pro-carbon, anti-abortion and firmly opposed to any whiff of ‘an entitlement society’. In a Senate split almost 50/50 between the donkey and the elephant, Manchin has become the centre around which politics inside the DC beltway revolves. He likes the attention that lets his political whimsy rule the roost. Which way will Joe jump on this or that piece of legislation?
To get a sense of Manchin’s social conservative and pro-carbon politics, a good start is understanding who he is and where he comes from. Manchin is the senior senator from the US coalmining State of West Virginia. He has held the seat since 2010, having previously served as the state’s governor. In that role, Joe stood up to those nasties at the Environmental Protection Agency over new rules that limited mountaintop-removal mining, accusing the Obama administration of attempting to ‘destroy our coal industry’.
