The New Yorker always has interesting profiles and I got to reading one about West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat who is the one bulwark in the U.S. Senate against a Republican majority.
That is, in a Senate divided 50/50, Manchin is the swing vote on the Democratic side. And he has been known to oppose the hopes and dreams of the Democratic Party’s center-left coalition.
So lots of people are writing about him, including the New Yorker, which bent over backward to avoid talking about one of the inner strengths that Manchin has: His determination to be a Catholic politician, even in an age in which compromise is all but impossible.
Tmatt has covered Manchin beforehand and these days, Manchin is very much in the headlines these days because if anything, the diference between two major parties is massive.
The story begins with a near-fatal accident involving two Senators, one of them Manchin.
In another year, the prospect of losing two Democratic senators overboard in an ice storm might be greeted with a certain wry resignation among Washington’s political class. This year, it inspires panic, at least among Democrats: in a 50-50 Senate, the Party’s agenda is only one vote — or one heartbeat — from oblivion. Manchin, in particular, holds extraordinary power.
As perhaps the Senate’s most conservative Democrat, he often breaks from the Party, which gives him a de-facto veto over a large swath of the Administration’s agenda. In the first months of Joe Biden’s Presidency, Manchin tanked the nomination of Neera Tanden as budget director (he disapproved of her tweets), opposed raising the corporate tax rate to twenty-eight per cent (he preferred twenty-five per cent), and single-handedly narrowed unemployment benefits in a COVID-relief bill.
Over and over, Manchin said that he was driven by a fundamental faith in bipartisanship, a belief that Democrats could and must find Republican support for their legislation—a posture so at odds with the present hostilities in Washington that it evoked a man hoisting his glass for a toast while his guests lunged at one another with steak knives…
Biden and Manchin have obvious points in common—two white, Catholic Joes, in their seventies, both former football players who take pride in their working-class roots, long after becoming wealthy.
What drives Manchin, what gives him the courage to stand alone as he so often does? That’s a totally logical question.
One of the few times “faith” is mentioned is in a sentence where Manchin “broke faith with the Republican Party” or that he has “faith in compromise.”
There are the signs: he takes his faith seriously. He’s from an Italian-American family; grew up in a family of five kids; they were all inspired in John F. Kennedy becoming the country’s first Catholic president. Of the 14 Catholic Democrats in the Senate, only Manchin opposes abortion. That alone would be an interesting profile: The loneliest seat in Congress: Joe Manchin as a pro-life Democrat.
Since the New Yorker team obviously did not in-depth research on the man’s religious beliefs, let’s see what other publications have done. His office put out a press release:: “Deep Faith a Big Part of Manchin’s Life.” It talked about how they simply didn’t miss Sunday church. Then some quotes:
“I was raised with an awful lot of faith in God.”
But denomination or religion is not important, he added.
“What matters is sacrificing for your neighbor. The wealthy sometimes have a hard time giving. My father would sometimes borrow money from the bank to give it away…
“From going to church in Farmington, a certain amount of structure was there. That’s how all of us were raised, with unconditional love.
“That did as much, if not more, to shape me and the belief I have in God and ultimately people, that good can come. Church has structure and discipline.
OK, not particularly deep thoughts, but it shows the man has some sense of the divine.
Back to the Catholic angle: What church does he attend when he’s home? What does his priest think of him? How about the local bishop?
We’re not talking about one of many Democrats here; we’re talking about the only one in the Senate who is pro-life. Certain Manchin’s fellow Catholics get this; read this open letter to him from Jesuit-run America magazine.
This piece, broadcast by a Wheeling, W.V. TV station, talks about Manchin’s presence at an event fusing environmentalism with the Catholic Church. So there’s a there there. And here is an open letter to him from the National Catholic Reporter disagreeing with Manchin refusing to go along with other Dems in trying to do away with the filibuster.
The New Yorker may not really register the Catholicity of this man, but others do. I’m not saying it’d be easy to get Manchin to say anything substantial about his faith. In a 2017 profile, Politico scraped together a few more details about Manchin’s existence as a blue-dog Democrat; a breed that is almost extinct.
Manchin is a Democrat because of the Kennedys, and because he was and is Catholic, and because of coal and the unions of workers who pulled it out of mountains, and because of where he grew up, and when—the 1950s and ’60s, when basically everybody in West Virginia, and especially in Farmington, up by the Pennsylvania border, was a Democrat.
That was back in the day when one could be conservative on cultural issues and a Democrat and no one would blink an eye. They don’t make them like that anymore.
So Manchin is part of a vanishing breed. But remember, once there were quite a few conservative Catholic Democrats like him and any story on this man needs to include details about the faith that brought him to where he is today.
FIRST IMAGE: From the newsroom page of Sen. Joe Manchin’s Senate website.