Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema Prove Their Loyalty to Trump One Last Time

Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema are some of the worst politicians of this era. They are both power-hungry egomaniacs who saw the ability to appoint themselves de facto president in a razor-thin Senate that empowered individuals to be their worst selves, and they proved their worth as soulless ghouls prostrating themselves at the feet of the donor class. Manchin and Sinema’s legacies are being the avatars of self-serving Beltway creatures who couch a conservative ideology in alleged centrist savviness that has had its ass handed to it by a bunch of lemmings who think that they are eating the dogs and eating the cats.

The one thing this kind of self-interested right-winger pretending to be a centrist in a liberal party is good at though, is destroying the liberal agenda. It is pretty clear that Joe Manchin deciding that only Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act about building stuff could pass while his Inflation Reeducation Act bill centered on the care economy could not is one of the bigger political missteps of the Biden era that helped usher Trump into office. Lefties like Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush fought to restore social assistance that was given out during the first wave of the pandemic that people have noticed being taken away under a Democratic president, and it cost them their seats as they wrongly were portrayed by a flood of AIPAC money as opposing the entirety of Biden’s agenda when they were in fact, some of the only ones in Congress who were supporting all of it. Biden made a lot of political missteps these last four years, but it’s hard to see how he could have gotten both bills past these two assholes, two of the best assets the Republican Party has outside of the fictional universe it created for its voters that has now enmeshed itself throughout the entire country.

Ironically, there is a lot you can get done in a “lame duck” period after the election where the outgoing president is basically persona non grata and no one is really paying attention to what they are doing. Some really good things have happened, like Biden commuting the sentences of almost 1,500 people and pardoning 39 others while promising to do more, and some likely not so good things, like Chuck Schumer making a deal to give four appeals court judges to people who have spent the last 43 years of his life pantsing him in public. Sinema and Manchin decided to make sure some really not so good things happened, and their legacy as traitors to the people was enshrined on their way out of Congress. Yesterday, they voted against the nomination of Lauren McFarren, current chair of the National Labor Relations Board, ensuring that Trump will now control the NLRB. Had either voted to confirm McFarren, Democrats would hold a majority on the NLRB for another five years.

The NLRB was established in 1935, a year which followed a period of rampant inequality, greed and corruption by the wealthy elite that definitely doesn’t resemble our current moment. Many are familiar with what happened in 1929, but if you’re not, just look at any chart of any major stock market index turn into a shitcoin and you’ll get the picture of what this kleptocracy all led to. Unions were crushed during this era, and steel strikes in places like Gary, Indiana were defeated with help of the U.S. Army occupying the town and declaring martial law. This was a violent period in American history, from the Colorado Labor Wars in 1903 to the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 to the establishment of the Pinkertons to specifically bust up unions (which were sold to Securitas AB for $384 million in 1999, worth a little over $727 million in today’s dollars), labor and capital were quite literally at war in the late 19th and early 20th century.

And apparently Manchin and Sinema look at that as an idyllic period in American history they would love to return to. To name just a few of Trump’s labor plans, he wants to roll back anti-discrimination labor laws, limit the scope of protections to employees under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, and he vows to reinstate an executive order from 2020 that would reclassify thousands of federal employees as “at-will” workers, enabling a systematic rollback of regulatory enforcement across the board. We are speed-running through the Gilded Age and under Trump we are about to speed up, and no one should be surprised if all this greed and rampant corruption winds up leading to another generational economic collapse that now seems like a once-in-every-ten-years-ish event.

When the inevitable labor violations happen under Trump’s rule in the future, don’t just blame him. Blame these allies of corruption who will be living a comfortable life likely lobbying for some depraved company rich in blood money. America’s elite class is currently demonstrating how alarmingly detached it is from the public on a scale not seen since the Gilded Age, and it’s difficult to see how this unfolding saga does not end poorly for everyone. Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema will forever be remembered as traitors to the common man, and bootlicking kleptocratic allies accelerating the collapse of the American empire.