On Sunday, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) appeared ready to kill the Build Back Better Act, a legislative package funding child care, early childhood education, health care, clean energy, and tax credits for parents, which is one of President Joe Biden’s top legislative priorities.
It’s possible, as my colleague Andrew Prokop notes, to read Manchin’s recent denunciation of the bill as merely an effort to force harsh concessions from other Democrats.
Regardless of how Manchin’s comments about Build Back Better should be read (he told Fox News that “this is a no — on this legislation”), the only reason why Manchin’s opinion of the legislation matters at all is that the United States Senate is a malapportioned trainwreck that gives each resident of Wyoming more than 68 times as much representation as each resident of California.
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