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Manchin & Sinema: It’s about fund raising, stupid
Tonight on The Beat with Ari Melber the real reason Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema have been holding back their votes for the Biden Infrastructure plan finally came out: fund raising.
To understand how this works, I refer to the book Extortion, written by Peter Schweizer. Schweizer explains that members of Congress regularly extort business by playing both sides of an issue. If they remain silent about their intended votes on big bills, they can collect checks from interested parties on both sides.
As Ari’s guest today, Chai Komanduri pointed out, the branding strategy Sinema and Manchin appear to be promoting doesn’t make sense in the current environment. The idea that Sinema, for example, could be a maverick like John McCain “doesn’t really fly when what matters now is how popular Joe Biden is and what individual Senators are doing to make him more popular…”
Komanduri goes on to say that moderate Democrats simply cannot raise copious amounts of money fund raising online. Their positions are not extreme enough. They can’t rally the crowds over moderation. So, when it comes to a huge spending bill, like Biden’s Build Back Better plan, they obfuscate.
Neither will say what they need to see in the bill before they sign on. Nor will they commit to a dollar amount that would sway their…
