Sinema and Manchin Burnish Their Legacy

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You might have thought we were done with the dynamic duo of Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) and Joe Manchin (I-WV), whose senatorial careers end later this month. After all, as The Wall Street Journal reported, Sinema had “skipped every vote since November 21,” including those on squeaker-close judicial confirmations. (On what basis Sinema draws her salary has long been a mystery.) As for Manchin, when the Senate voted yesterday on the confirmation of President Biden’s nomination of National Labor Relations Board chair Lauren McFerran to another term, he was nowhere to be found until the last minute.

But the redoubtable two—S&M, if you prefer—managed to show up after all to vote against McFerran, and thereby ensure that by one vote she’d be rejected. (The vote was 49 yes, 50 no, with all other Democrats voting yes and all the Republicans, save one who wasn’t there, voting no.) Sinema, who voted for McFerran as recently as 2020, showed up first, which put the measure into a 49-49 tie, which Vice President Harris could have broken in McFerran’s favor. Only then did Manchin rouse himself to race to the floor and vote no.

Based on reporting, it seems that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had expected Manchin to be absent, prepping VP Harris to get over to the Senate to break the tie. But Manchin, who was at a speaking engagement, rushed over first. “The only thing they could do is catch me when I’m not there,” he told Semafor.

McFerran was one of the three Democratic appointees on the five-member board. Had she been confirmed for another five-year term, the Democrats would have preserved their board majority until 2026, when another member’s term would end, whom Donald Trump would then replace with a Republican.

Under McFerran’s leadership, the Board has sought to restore the National Labor Relations Act to something like what its 1935 authors intended it to be. They increased the previously negligible penalties employers had to pay when they illegally fired workers engaged in organizing campaigns, required those employers to enter into bargaining if they were found to repeatedly violate the law when a majority of their workers had signed union affiliation cards, and recently banned “captive audience” meetings, in which employers compel their employees to attend anti-union propaganda meetings. (Such meetings can continue, only employers can no longer threaten their workers with penalties or firing to compel their attendance.)

By voting against McFerran, S&M have enabled Trump to promptly appoint her replacement and put the Board under his control. During Trump’s first term, the Board issued a host of rulings that essentially allowed management to run roughshod over their workers if they sought to join or form a union, and there’s no reason to think that Trump’s second-term Board would do anything different.

Manchin’s defenders customarily say that he’s just expressing the views of ordinary Americans, which are well to the right of the Democrats on cultural issues. Centrist commentators of the Ruy Teixeira strain also have argued that the Democrats have moved too far left on some economic issues, too. But while some of those commentators have questioned the size of the Biden stimulus and some antitrust policies, I can’t think of any who have objected to the Biden NLRB’s efforts to enable workers to freely join unions, which was, along with Social Security, the signal achievement of the New Deal.

Moreover, S&M weren’t voting in accord with public opinion, either. Their vote comes at a moment when unions’ approval rating is higher than it’s been in almost 70 years, when at least 4 out of 5 Americans under 30 approve of unions, and when polls also show that working-class Republicans approve of unions by substantial majorities, too. In short, the very voters that the Democrats need to reclaim are decidedly pro-union.

But S&M are made of sterner stuff, rejecting not just current Democratic positions, but the party’s New Deal foundations. Sinema’s vote evokes memories of her vote that killed the bill to raise the $7.25 federal minimum wage, which she accompanied with a thumbs-down gesture and a little wiggle. Manchin’s vote called to mind his vote that killed the extension of the Child Tax Credit that had, during the pandemic, reduced the rate of child poverty in America by between 30 and 40 percent. (Reports that The Friends of Child Poverty plan to give Manchin a lifetime achievement award are probably unfounded.) Of course, in Manchin’s defense, he could always argue that there’s no poverty in West Virginia.

Those who argue that the Democrats need to become more of a “big tent” party are usually constrained by their belief that Democrats should at least agree on the notion that workers deserve some agency, some modicum of power. Such constraints have never impeded S&M. Their vision of a suitable Democratic Party has been one in which the party reached out to the working class with perspectives and policies that completely fucked it over.

Where will we find their like?