Senator Joe Manchin may be a reader of the Hotline because he ripped the Govzilla bill at a Wall Street Journal forum, repeating a lot of the arguments we’ve raised for months:

“You want me to go back to West Virginia and say, ‘Boys, if you can just stay unemployed for a little longer, you’ll get a raise’? None of this makes sense to me.”

He again called for “a strategic pause for spending and money creation,” adding that “if we get any of those wrong, we’re in trouble.”

And here’s the killer blow:

“We’ve spent $5.4 trillion out the door, we have another $1.2 with the infrastructure bill…. I couldn’t get my head around $5.4. So I said give me something to compare it to — World War II. We saved the world, then you had the Marshall Plan rebuild Europe. In today’s dollars that would be $4.7 trillion.”

And one more:

“I’ve told my colleagues, if you guys are upset, just go out and elect more liberals, I’m not liberal….I don’t try to change Bernie (Sanders) Bernie is true to himself, I respect and appreciate that. Why do they want to change me?”

Where does this leave things?  Larry Kudlow sounds this note of optimism:

“After listening to Senator Manchin at the WSJ CEO Council yesterday, I believe more than ever that President Biden’s extraordinarily costly Green New Deal bill is going to be paused, then paused some more, and then killed next year.”

Merry Christmas!

https://www.nysun.com/national/manchin-raises-hopes-bidens-big-bill-will-fail/91804/