Dan Kaufman writes:

Last month, as Democrats were struggling to craft a passable version of the Build Back Better Act, a $3.5-trillion bill that contains much of the Biden Administration’s domestic agenda, Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, told a group of reporters, “I cannot accept our economy, or, basically, our society, moving towards an entitlement mentality.” The Democrats are attempting to pass the measure through the budget-reconciliation process, an effort that will take every Democratic vote in the Senate. In return for his support, Manchin is reportedly demanding that the bill be cut by more than half, eliminating or radically scaling back key provisions such as the expansion of Medicare to cover dental, hearing, and vision; paid family and medical leave; the child tax credit; and the clean-electricity program, which would penalize gas- and coal-fired power plants in an effort to mitigate climate change.

It’s not a secret that Manchin, whose personal worth is in the millions, has deep ties to the fossil-fuel industry. Last year, he received half a million dollars in dividends from Enersystems, a coal company he started in the late eighties, which is now run by his son. He is also the U.S. senator who’s received the most money in political donations from the oil, gas, and coal industries. But an underexamined aspect of Manchin’s history is his early membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which brings together lobbyists, state legislators, and representatives of conservative think tanks to draft and disseminate model bills. Since its founding in 1973, the organization’s work has laid the foundation for thousands of laws passed by state legislatures that have weakened labor unions, redirected public-school funding to private schools, hobbled the welfare state, restricted voting rights, and blocked or reshaped environmental regulations in favor of business interests. “ALEC is unique in the sense that it puts legislators and companies together and they create policy collectively,” Scott Pruitt, a former ALEC leader and President Trump’s head of the E.P.A., explained to Governing magazine, in 2003.

Documents disclosed as part of a series of legal settlements with the tobacco industry show that Manchin, as a West Virginia state senator in the nineties, was deeply involved with ALEC. At the group’s annual conference, in 1993, which was held at a resort in Traverse City, Michigan, attendees took part in sponsored events such as R. J. Reynolds’s mixed golf tournament and skeet and trap shooting, paid for by the National Rifle Association. Manchin, then a national director for the organization, moderated a workshop devoted to health-care costs, which promised to reveal how “the true demon in America’s health care spending has become our own government programs, Medicare and Medicaid.” The panelists included a representative from the Seniors Coalition—later accused by the A.A.R.P. of being a front group for the pharmaceutical lobby—and a representative from the drugmaker Mylan. Years later, Manchin’s daughter Heather Bresch became the president and C.E.O. of Mylan. The company is currently facing an antitrust lawsuit alleging that it colluded with Pfizer to eliminate competition for its EpiPen, the price of which rose by several hundred per cent under Bresch’s leadership. (Manchin declined a request to comment for this article.) [Continue reading…]