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Coal Miners Plead with Manchin to Actually Represent West Virginians And Support Build Back Better

Tim Libretti, PhD
3 min readDec 30, 2021

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Senator Joe Manchin has persistently, indeed defiantly, ignored polling that demonstrates broad support among West Virginians for the provisions in President Biden’s Build Back Better legislative agenda.

Regardless of this polling, Manchin has continued to pretend he is fulfilling his role in our representational democracy by serving the interests of his people, when in fact he is blatantly abdicating that senatorial responsibility. In fact, he continues to attribute his unwillingness and inability to support Biden’s Build Back Better Act on his insistence that it will not make sense — that he can’t justify it — to the voters of West Virginia.

He said recently:

“I have always said, ‘If I can’t go back home and explain it, I can’t vote for it.’ Despite my best efforts, I cannot explain the sweeping Build Back Better Act in West Virginia and I cannot vote to move forward on this mammoth piece of legislation.”

West Virginians themselves are now speaking out and challenging Manchin’s perfidy, exposing the bad faith of his rhetoric and, presumably, making his position on Build Back Better increasingly untenable.

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Tim Libretti, PhD
Tim Libretti, PhD

Written by Tim Libretti, PhD

Professor of Literature, Political Economy enthusiast, Dad, always thinking about the optimal world

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