Washington’s new power couple
DRY FORK, W.VA. -- Meet the unlikely new power couple of Washington, D.C.
One is a former private equity baron, the other worked in the family carpet and furniture business. Both are from political families, both have business degrees, both represent states marked by massive mountain ranges, both are former governors, and both thus know the burden of executive leadership and fiscal responsibility. Both are party apostates, eyed as converts from their rival parties.
Mitt Romney, the Republican from Utah, and Joe
Manchin III, the Democrat from West Virginia, are the moving parts of the Senate.
“There are a lot of pressure points in a 50-50 Senate,” said Beth Myers, who played major roles in both of Romney’s presidential campaigns and remains close with him, “and
Mitt and Manchin are at the center of it all.”
When the new Institute of Politics at Florida State University created an award for civility, the two winners were Manchin and Romney. The celebratory event was postponed, poignantly, because of the January siege of Capitol Hill, and then when Romney was left unconscious after a fall in late February and could not attend. Even so, the two are, in the characterization of Hans J.G. Hassell, director of the institute, “representative of the collaborative approach we wanted to highlight.”
He added: “We wanted students to see that politicians could be civil and still hold their principles.”
The two have worked together since Romney, a former governor of
Massachusetts and the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, entered the Senate in
2019, almost a decade after Manchin joined the chamber on the other side of the aisle. Their efforts led to some compromise elements in the original COVID19 relief bill.
Manchin is the personification of pivotal politics, a concept created by the
Stanford political scientist Keith Krehbiel.
The Democrats need him to get to 50 votes and, with the tiebreaking power of Vice President Kamala Harris, retain their Senate majority.
“Some Democrats are frustrated with him when instead they should be thanking him,” said Jason A. Macdonald, a West Virginia University political scientist. “He deserves their thanks for winning elections in years that were awful for the Democrats in a state that is awful for the Democrats. They should remember that because of him they have the gavel in the Senate.”
The peculiar politics of this state are best viewed through the careers of both Manchin and Romney.
Manchin’s 2018 re-election came with less than 50% of the vote against the state’s Republican attorney general, Patrick Morrisey. Six years earlier, Romney, romping in a state that had turned resolutely Republican, defeated Barack Obama by 26.8 percentage points. That marked a 31.5 percentage-point pivot in the state’s political profile from the performance of a previous Massachusetts governor in a presidential race, when Democrat Michael S. Dukakis beat Vice President George H.W. Bush by 4.7 percentage points in 1988.
That was then. The reality today, largely because of Republican success in portraying Democrats as enemies of coal and guns, is a state with a distinct GOP tint. Donald J. Trump won almost precisely the same percentage of the vote (more than 68%, landslide proportions by any measure) in the last two elections.
Manchin has played his cards skillfully in a rapidly changing political casino. He voted to confirm two of the three Trump Supreme Court nominees and flirted with endorsing Trump. But in a Politico interview, in comments directed at GOP Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, who continued on the floor of the Senate to raise objections to 2020 state election results, he said, “I don’t know how you can live with yourself right now knowing that people lost their lives.”
Romney has the reverse profile, a Republican who has raised questions about Trump’s leadership and voted to convict the 45th president in both Senate impeachment trials -- a position with little risk for him in Utah, where he won by a margin of more than 2-to-1 in 2018.
“Mitt Romney has a keen sense of right and wrong and is an accomplished problem-solver,” said Darrell Crate, who was treasurer of the two Romney presidential campaigns. “Every day he gets up and does what he thinks is best for America. That is as true as true gets.” That is not the view of Trump’s supporters, some of whom heckled Romney as a “traitor” on a flight from Salt Lake City to Washington on the morning of the Capitol riot.
Romney has emerged as what former New Hampshire attorney general Thomas D. Rath, a prominent Republican who has worked for nine Republican presidential candidates in the state’s critical primary, describes as “the conscience of longtime Republicans.”
But Romney oftentimes breaks the mold, or at least breaks party expectations. This winter, he proposed a child allowance for parents in the COVID relief bill that was larger than President Biden’s plan.
Manchin also will hold the balance of power in any infrastructure bill that comes before the Senate; as a lawmaker from an energy-extraction state, he is unlikely to support legislation with even a whiff of the Green New Deal, which endangers the position of coal in the nation’s economy.
Two men on the fringes of their parties now find themselves at the center of the Senate. In a legislative body that elevates the power of the individual, they now are a power center as well.