West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin on Monday warned the Democratic Party not to engage in payback when it comes to President-elect Trump’s nomination to the Supreme Court or they will continue to lose a significant portion of the electorate in rural states like his who helped hand Trump the presidency.
“We have to be careful how we go down this road,” Manchin said during a panel discussion at a centrist “No Labels” conference in Washington.
Manchin was referring to Senate Democrats’ willingness to use the filibuster to try to block Trump’s high court pick and cautioned against doing so.
“If my Democrat friends just hunker down and say, ‘No, no, and hell no’…I can understand that [Republicans] are gong to say, ‘Wait a minute, we have a pretty good person here. We need to give him a fair shot,'” he said. “Those types of things, I hope we’re going to avoid before we get into this dysfunction that we’ve been in.”
Manchin, a conservative-leaning Democrat who has always played an outsized role in the Republican Senate majority, is under consideration for energy secretary in the Trump administration.
After the election, Senate Democrats realized they had lost voters in states like West Virginia and the so-called Rust Belt and appointed Manchin to a leadership role in response.
On the leadership team, Manchin has said he’s going to work to try to bring his party “back to the middle.”
“I look at all of this … this is big change,” he said. “We have big change in our country right now, and with every big change, comes opportunity.”
On the flip side, he also warned Republicans not to repeal Obamacare while waiting two-to-three years to pass a replacement.
“It would be much easier,” if Republicans didn’t wait, he argued.
“If you say we’re gong to do this and we’re going to take a two- to three-year period to work out the differences, then some of my colleagues are going to say, ‘Wait a minute, you’ve had six years and 60 votes to repeal it, and you haven’t give us any alternative,” he said.
Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., said the problems with Obamacare date back to its creation when it passed with “zero bipartisan support,” which he credited with causing a lot of the “blowback” on the legislation.
Because Republicans are set to have only a 52 to 53 seat advantage in the Senate, they will be forced to use the budget reconciliation bill as a vehicle to repeal the law because it only requires a simple majority of 51 votes to pass.
“But the replacement will have to be bipartisan because we would face, perhaps at our peril, a different political landscape that will blow back because I think the American people say something very, very strongly … ‘We want results moving forward,'” Daines said.
“We’re going to need Sen. Manchin’s to get to 60 votes [for a replacement],” he said. “And if we do that, we’ll have a replacement that will stand the test of time.”
Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., predicted that it will be easier to get 60 votes on separate, incremental bills to replace it because “there’s an understanding that where we are now has gotta change … everybody knows the system isn’t working.”
He suggested that the replacements could take place incrementally in separate pieces of legislation that come over the next two to three year period, including his portion of the health care bill he authored that required children of 26 years or younger to continue on their parents’ insurance plans.
“We don’t need to do all that in [one huge bill],” Blunt said. “There won’t be a 1,500-page Republican bill that replaced the 2,700 page bill that we’re moving away from. I really see that coming a piece at a time.”
