With the deadline approaching, Democratic leaders were trying to line up the votes to pass their bill. But they had a problem: Joe Manchin had put his foot down.
The year was 1983, the setting was West Virginia’s statehouse in Charleston, and the deadline was the end of the legislative session at midnight. Democratic leaders wanted to pass a bill creating a board that could cap rates charged by hospitals in the state. Manchin, a 35-year-old first-term state representative, had opposed the proposal.
Dave Lieber, who was then a reporter for the Charleston Gazette, has written about what he saw happen that night. As the House of Delegates Manchin’s chamber was taking a series of votes, Manchin was “over in the Senate, he was kneeling at the desk of the Senate clerk, a really in-your-face move,” Lieber told Vox. Manchin, who had been elected just four months ago, was negotiating.
Addressing the information gap for Black West Virginians
When Crystal Good was sixteen years old, she tried to buy one of the last Black newspapers in West Virginia. “Looking back, I’m not sure how I thought I was going to pay for it,” Good says, laughing. “And of course, they wouldn’t sell me the paper, but they asked me to sell ads for them. And I was like,
Oh, hell no.” Years later, Good is building a publication of her own, one “that allows for Black voices to have their own microphones, not the microphone passed to them and then taken back,” she says.
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Opinion
Why is Sen. Joe Manchin running America? He’s a most skilled dealmaker. I’ve seen it up close
The Watchdog was 20 feet away when Manchin struck his first big political deal almost 40 years ago. Manchin denied it, but it happened.
Sen. Joe Manchin is a make-or-break senator. As the 50th vote in a tied Senate, he s the ultimate dealmaker. Watchdog Dave Lieber watched him make his first big political deal almost 40 years ago. He s a horse trader supreme, Lieber writes.
It’s easy to see that U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin III, likely the most conservative Senate Democrat, is a wheeler-dealer par excellence. Or as they’d say in his home state of West Virginia, “He comes by it honestly.”