News came down late Tuesday afternoon that West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who sold the country out in August by caving into Chuck Schumer one more time on the Orwellian-named Inflation Reduction Act, tossed in the towel on his so-called “permitting reform” bill.
“Now he gets nothing,” says Byron York. Well, we can be sure he got something in return for dooming our country to another decade and more of a crumbling power grid and increasingly-frequent power blackouts as all the money goes into expanding unreliable wind and solar capacity at the expense of real energy sources, but we will likely never really know exactly what that something was.
The death knell for Manchin’s brief effort to sell his bill came Monday, when it became known that Mitch McConnell was already whipping the GOP caucus vote to oppose the language being included in the must-pass continuing resolution to fund the government and avoid a shutdown. Manchin was going to need at least a dozen Republican votes - and probably more than that - to overcome an inevitable filibuster, and those votes weren’t going to be there.
This became especially certain once Manchin agreed to placate the radical left of his own party by removing language that would have enacted crucial reforms of the National Energy Policy Act and other key environmental laws that have been abused by anti-development activists to stall key energy infrastructure projects for decades. Absent that language, the bill was essentially worthless in any event.
With the death of his permitting bill also comes the essential death of Manchin’s hopes to be re-elected in heavily-Republican West Virginia in 2024. The death of his career should have been ended by WVA voters in 2018, but Manchin managed to survive based on his personal standing as a well-liked former Governor who used to display at least some real conservative principles. This most recent episode killed all of that mythology for good, and it’s a safe bet the voters back home have finally had enough of his rank cowardice and serial betrayals in Washington.
In a terrific op/ed, the Wall Street Journal wrote over the weekend about the most bitter pill Manchin saddled his home state and the rest of the country with by supporting the Inflation Reduction Act, in the form of massively expanded powers for FERC.
Here’s an excerpt from it:
The bill lets FERC override states and approve transmission lines in the “national interest” if they “enhance the ability of facilities that generate or transmit firm or intermittent energy to connect to the electric grid.” This explicitly ties the national interest to “intermittent” renewable power sources. The provision would let progressive states essentially bill the cost of their renewable-energy mandates to states without those mandates. Residents in West Virginia, Ohio and Indiana could be forced to pay for wind energy that’s needed to meet renewable mandates in Illinois, Maryland and New Jersey.
A Princeton University study in 2020 estimated the grid could need $2.4 trillion in transmission upgrades to reach the left’s net-zero emissions goal by 2050. Last year’s infrastructure bill provided tens of billions of dollars for the grid. The Manchin bill socializes the rest of the cost.
[End]
In plain terms, these expanded FERC powers are a formula for ensuring the rest of the country gets saddled with the California/Germany power grid model that has been such an unmitigated, destructive failure.
So, like Old Joe Biden, our country will only have Joe Manchin to kick around for two more years. Unfortunately, as we have so clearly seen, both old fossils are capable of inflicting an incredible amount of damage on our Republic over the span of 24 months.
Pray we can survive the winding down of their disgraceful careers intact.
Let’s move on…
In other news, a current member of the EU Parliament yesterday blamed the United States for the apparent bombing of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipeline systems. I write about that potential act of outright war at my Energy Transition Absurdities Substack today:
Go read it, and if you aren’t on the email list, sign up. It’s free.
Meanwhile, as a Category 4 hurricane was about to make landfall in Florida, the old reprobate in the White House was refusing to lift a finger to coordinate efforts with the Governor of that state:
Instead of doing his duty, he was conducting a meeting at which he urged Floridians to take the time to get the vax before they evacuated. I swear I’m not making that up:
He finally relented on his destructive pettiness and gave Gov. DeSantis a brief call late Tuesday evening, but not before he had called several friendly city Mayors and urged them to cut the state’s emergency preparedness operations out of the communications loop and call him directly instead.
This man is a soulless ghoul. There is no other explanation.
Hey, remember, like two weeks ago, when all the push pollsters and media hacks were assuring us that the Democrats were “surging” ahead in the general elections?
Yeah, that’s all over now:
Look, this is like clockwork, folks. It happens every election cycle. All the push pollsters fake up Democrat-leaning polls early in the cycle, and then, with about 50 days or so to go before Election Day, the polls suddenly start changing to try to reflect what the actual outcomes might be so that they can later claim to have been “right.”
There will be a Red Wave in November. It won’t be as overwhelming as 2010, but it will be big enough to get the job done.
That is all.
Biden is a flat-out jerk. Even Obama worked with Christie after superstorm Sandy. Bush worked with the god-awful Gov Blanco after Katrina.
I happen to catch an interview of Manchin on Fox with cutie pie Shannon Bream Sunday where Manchin looked and sounded like a little whiny boy that had been caught stealing cookies. During the interview he kept trying to lay blame on the republicans by saying they were not supporting his bill. News flash for old Joe Manchin is he didn't make a deal with the republicans he made it with Shyster Schumer, and she devil herself Pelosi. The republicans don't owe Manchin squat. The democrats used him, and the republicans don't want him. I hope when 2024 gets here that he is repudiated by West Virginians to the point he is never heard from again.