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.