The myth that President Joe Biden is a centrist has been maintained since he announced his candidacy. It turns out that Biden is so centrist he has now taken to attacking centrist senators in his own party for not supporting the progressive legislation he is trying to force on the country.
During his visit to Tulsa, Oklahoma, Biden tried to brush off criticism of why he can’t get things done by blaming “two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.” It’s an obvious shot at the only two centrist Democrats in the Senate, Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
Manchin and Sinema have voted with Biden 100% of the time, but voting numbers don’t tell the whole story. Obviously, if a Democratic senator signals he won’t back a move in the evenly split Senate, chances are it won’t even come up for a vote (such as the nomination of Neera Tanden to the Office of Management and Budget, which Manchin opposed). So, what exactly is it that Manchin and Sinema are standing against?
Manchin opposes H.R. 1, the bill pushed by House Democrats that would lead to a federal takeover of state election laws and would have a “dangerous” effect on free speech, according to the liberal American Civil Liberties Union. He also opposes the overreaching gun control measures being pushed by the House, and, of course, he has resisted the liberal demand to abolish the filibuster, which would lead to a flood of destructive legislation that he would then be expected to support in lockstep.
Manchin and Sinema’s opposition to eliminating the filibuster means that other measures that Biden supports, such as the Democratic power grab of granting statehood to Washington, D.C., are dead in the water. Manchin and Sinema both opposed increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, but they were joined by six other Democratic senators, including Biden’s good friend Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware.
Biden was never a centrist. His career voting record in the Senate has always been in the left-most quadrant of that body. And, since the moment he launched his presidential campaign, in which he quickly folded on his support for the Hyde Amendment, which bans the federal funding of abortions, he made it clear he was running a progressive campaign, even if it was overshadowed by the far more absurd left-wing candidates who were challenging him. He proclaimed he would be the most progressive president in history, and the Democratic platform was clearly more radical than ever before.
Biden was never a centrist, because standing on the same stage as Sen. Bernie Sanders does not make you a centrist. The same progressive activists who Manchin and Sinema have resisted so far are the ones who Biden has capitulated to at every turn. Biden is not the one holding back the excesses of the Democratic Party: He is the one handing the keys to the party to its progressive wing.
