Good riddance to Washington's real power duo

Senate Democrats have started to say their goodbyes. 

“Some of the happiest times I have had in the Senate were on Joe Manchin’s boat,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. The New York leader recently took to the Senate floor to thank Manchin for his frolicking houseboat parties on the Potomac — always featuring a bipartisan guest list, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin made sure to mention. 

“Some of the biggest accomplishments of the” Biden administration, Schumer admitted, “would not have gotten done without Joe.” Wishing farewell to the retiring West Virginia senator, Schumer called Manchin “invaluable.” 

Senate Democrats showered retiring Arizona Sen. Krysten Sinema with similar praise. 

“Senator Sinema always made a splash and often,” colleague and Virginia Democrat Mark Warner noted, “at the end of the day, won her battles.” The senator continued: “But for all the ink spilled on Kyrsten, what I think a lot of people failed to see is her incredible ability to talk and build relationships with everyone. There have been so many times—not just on the big bills, candidly not just at the behest of Democratic leadership, but candidly on the behest of some of our Republican friends, to say this senator is being particularly challenging on this bill or on this issue. I think there was probably no one who got sent into those kind of negotiation.” 

Days later, Manchin and Sinema united to scuttle Democrats’ efforts to hold off the incoming Trump administration’s efforts to roll back all of the progress on worker-friendly labor regulation that the Biden administration has implemented. 

“Millions of working people across the country will pay the price for their actions,” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said of the pair's vote to block the reconfirmation of Lauren McFerran to the National Labor Relations Board. Two of the NLRB’s five members are Republicans, and two are Democrats, and the sitting president chooses the board’s chairperson. The 48 other members of the Senate Democratic Caucus voted to confirm McFerran for another term, but Manchin and Sinema said no.

Neither Manchin nor Sinema are currently Democrats. Manchin started 2024 knowing it would be his last in the Senate. In May, he quit the Democratic Party. When Sinema ditched the Democratic Party in 2022 after serving three terms in the House as a Democrat and becoming the first Democrat in three decades to win an Arizona Senate race, it inflated Manchin’s outsized influence in the Democratic caucus.

Sinema, for her part, had been rather absent from recent Senate votes until the NLRB vote this week. The Wall Street Journal reported Sinema “skipped every vote since November 21,” including votes on critical judicial confirmations.

“Pathetic,” was the way fellow independent Bernie Sanders described the betrayal. Minnesota Democrat Tina Smith called it “disappointing.”

The two had previously supported a Republican resolution to overturn the NLRB. President Joe Biden vetoed it. During Biden's four years in office, the two clashed bitterly with Democratic colleagues over a number of legislative priorities while also playing a pivotal role in some of the president's signature accomplishments. In many ways, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have no legacy without Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. In so many other ways, Manchin and Sinema hampered the president's plans the whole way through. From the Inflation Reduction Act to Biden's Build Back Better plan, both blocked and slashed sweeping progressive legislation, making them the most disruptive elements of Biden’s domestic agenda. 

Manchin infuriated Democrats with his refusal to expand the child tax credit. During the debate of the expansion, a bunch of kayaking protesters famously confronted Manchin on his houseboat, “Almost Heaven” — named for lyrics in John Denver’s classic song about West Virginia. In the end, however, Manchin significantly shaped Biden's legacy by backing the much smaller Inflation Reduction Act and Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law.

Sinema maintained her resistance to higher tax rates and attempts to weaken the filibuster. She also supported Democratic party-line bills, even after leaving the party. She voted to convict former President Donald Trump in his two impeachment trials, opposed Trump-backed Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and supported Biden's Supreme Court nominee, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

For his part, Manchin argues that he often got “caught in the middle” of what Democrats want and what his West Virginia constituents in the MAGA stronghold of West Virginia want. Manchin’s last electoral victory was by less than 20,000 votes in 2018. Two years later, Trump won every county in the state in a near-40-point romp. 

 So what is reasonable for Democratic voters to expect from Democratic lawmakers in such a position? Manchin's retirement, along with the departure of Montana's Jon Tester, leaves few other Democrats in red states to navigate the dilemma. It is clear that the base of the Democratic coalition is far from Manchin's home state. Manchin and Sinema’s steadfast positioning says so much about Democrats’ problems with coalition-building.