CHARLESTON – The debt ceiling compromise just hashed out in Washington between House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden includes the completion of the long-overdue Mountain Valley Pipeline.
Many across the state are rightly celebrating the provisions of the package meant to speed up the remaining permitting red tape standing in the way of the project. If completed, the pipeline will mean more jobs along with more access to reliable, affordable energy.
Completing the project would be a win, but the fact remains when it comes to the federal regulatory overreach that held up the pipeline in the first place, along with other such projects like the Keystone XL pipeline, little has been accomplished. That’s the problem with governing via crisis — instead of achieving much needed systemic changes, we instead get a one-time deal to stick a single pipeline project into a must-pass bill. Washington can, and should, do better.
Huffman
This is not a dig at many leaders who worked hard to get the pipeline included in the compromise, like Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Speaker McCarthy, and, yes, even Senator Joe Manchin.
But before we the latter concludes his victory lap, let’s call the balls and strikes like they are.
President Biden promised to use federal government to “end fossil fuels.” Radical Democrats in Washington are taking him up on the offer by forcing an artificial energy transition that consumers here in West Virginia neither want nor asked for, and regardless of the financial pain it will cause families.
Meanwhile, instead of standing up to extremists in D.C., politicians like Senator Manchin are going along to get along. At the same time Manchin claims he’s “fighting back” against the Left’s war on American energy, he also says, “We have a transition coming. And we want to be ahead of that.” Those don’t sound like fighting words to this West Virginian.
If Senator Manchin was genuinely interested in fighting back, he’d at least try to cobble together enough votes to pass Speaker McCarthy’s Lower Energy Costs Act. If Manchin wanted comprehensive permitting reform, he’d have included it the bill he coauthored with President Biden last year, the Inflation Reduction Act.
As Appalachian granddaddies have aptly said for eons, “the proof is in the pudding.” Senator Manchin’s actions have not lived up to his tough talk.
Let’s not forget that Manchin was arguably the most powerful man in the free world when he was the deciding vote for the U.S. Senate for two years. His landmark accomplishment during that time? Manchin put politics over principles by striking a deal with Senate Democrats and President Biden to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, resulting in tens of billions in taxpayer funded handouts to unaccountable green energy companies, tens of thousands of new IRS agents, higher taxes including energy taxes that consumers will bear the brunt of, and trillions in additional spending that was sold as inflation reduction, but, as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office determined, would have little, if any, impact.
Senator Manchin has been flip-flopping on that decision ever since. When the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022 he said, “I’m proud of our efforts to get this legislation across the finish line.” He even thanked President Biden for signing the bill so quickly.
But in March, Manchin cried foul, alleging the Biden Administration was “subverting” the law. He even went so far as to say he would vote to repeal his own bill. Then last week, in an apparent about-face, Senator Manchin resumed defending the Inflation Reduction Act, saying, “this is a piece of legislation that we’re going to be benefiting from for a long time.”
It is unclear now, possibly even to the senator himself, if Manchin is for or against the bill he and President Biden sold the American people.
One thing is clear: Senator Manchin is increasingly out of touch with West Virginian’s policy preferences, especially when it comes to energy. One look at the massive dip his poll numbers took after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act will tell even the causal political observer that the move was not only bad policy but bad politics.
Here’s hoping that Senator Manchin will find the political courage to do better, and soon. A few thousand phone calls to his office might encourage him.
Huffman is the West Virginia state director of Americans for Prosperity.
