FROM FOX NEWS: Former Sen. Joe Manchin, I-W.Va., wanted Republicans to win the Senate last year in order to prevent Democrats’ pursuit of “raw political power.”
In his new book, “Dead Center: In Defense of Common Sense,” set to be released on Tuesday and obtained by Fox News Digital, the former West Virginia Democrat-turned-Independent ripped into his ex-political party, tore into former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden and blasted Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., while lauding the relationship that he had with President Donald Trump.
Manchin made waves when he and former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who also left the Democratic Party to become an Independent, bucked Schumer and voted against the move to nuke the Senate filibuster in 2022.
In his book, Manchin reveals that he felt pressure from Schumer and Senate Democrats to toe the line with his votes during Biden’s presidency.
Manchin said Schumer wanted a vote he “could broadcast to the radical left to prove his loyalty” and that he didn’t even really believe getting rid of the filibuster was the right thing to do, just that it fulfilled his “only priority”: maintaining control of the Senate.
“Because of what I knew — and what I had seen firsthand — I wanted Republicans to win the Senate majority in 2024,” Manchin wrote. “I believed it was the only hope for preserving the Senate as an institution. I truly believed that, if in power, Republicans would uphold the filibuster, the last guardrail preventing total partisan rule.”
“Schumer and the Democrats had already shown their hand — eliminating the filibuster would have been their first order of business,” he continued. “They had no interest in protecting the Senate’s role as the deliberative body. They only cared about raw political power.”
Manchin outlined an early fight he had with Biden over the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan endorsed by Democrats. Biden was still early in his presidency with an evenly divided Senate, but Manchin rejected the plan.
“As the drama began, I got a call from the president, and was he hot,” Manchin wrote. “‘If you kill this f— bill, I will never speak to you again,’ he promised. Anyone who knows Joe Biden — and I have known him for a very long time —knows he’s got a very bad temper. He calls it his ‘Irish.’ I call it unfortunate. But if he was going there, so was I.”
“‘Your actions are reckless,’ I spat back. ‘You’re sending a f— check to everyone. And if you missed anyone, it was only by mistake.’”
After “capitulating on the American Rescue Plan” when a compromise was reached, Manchin said he regretted it.
Manchin noted that Obama only contacted him twice during his entire presidency, “once after he won re-election to the Senate in 2012 and again in 2015 to persuade him from voting against his nuclear deal with Iran,” Fox reports.
Manchin described having a better relationship with President Donald Trump, considering him a fellow “outsider.”
“From the start, President Trump had an open line of communication with me. I spoke to him more in the first two years of his presidency than I did to President Obama during all eight years of his time in office,” Manchin said.
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