Sen. Joe Manchin Says Every Member Of 118th Congress Should Be ‘Ashamed’

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) declared that every member of Congress should be “ashamed” of the 118th Congress.

“Every one of us should be ashamed of what we’re, what we’re living through now in the 118th Congress,” the West Virginia senator told CNN in an interview. “Every Congress up until this 118th Congress has basically produced about 500 bills that we could work on and agree on and passed some form of legislation—500 to 520. We’ve only passed 69 bills.”

“What I’m really concerned about is if we lose the filibuster, you won’t create any new moderates,” Manchin added. “You will not have a middle at all. It will be swinging from the left and the right. That’s not who America is. That probably scares me more than anything.”

Former Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) agreed with Manchin’s assessment. “In the sense that Congress isn’t doing much legislating, and they’ve been rather dysfunctional,” Portman said. 

“The border policy, I think, has become sort of the poster child of what I’m talking about, that it’s hard to solve policy issues these days because both the right and the left seem to get some advantage from things being unsolved,” he went on to say.

Manchin stated that he thinks President Joe Biden “has done a bad job on the border” and that “he’s to blame for the border.”

“He made the decision,” he stated. “It opened up, and they haven’t closed it down.”

“He has to take blame for what is wrong, but he’s accepting it now to fix it,” he said. “And then it’s not being fixed because of politics. That’s what people don’t like.”

Manchin flirted for months with the idea of an independent presidential run.

During an appearance on Face The Nation in late January, Manchin said he loves America “too much to vote for Donald Trump.”

On February 16, Manchin stated that he would not run for president as a third-party candidate.