I’m guessing it’s more centrist than leftist, though. It’s also notoriously pale and male, a demographic that has a “pulling up the ladder” tendency.
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Didn’t know about the chemical companies; I knew he gets money from Big Oil & is a minor Coal Baron in his own right. Still gets a big payout from the company he divested to his son.
If only there were a way to deal with corruption in this country…
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Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
I was gonna say if he doesn’t know where in hell he belongs, he could ask Dante. I’m sure he’d be able to tell him.
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Well, he is a dinosaur, after all.
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We know the rules for WV because Manchin himself became Senator initially through special election after Robert Byrd died. At the time, Manchin was governor of WV. He appointed Carte Goodwin Senator, and then called on the WV legislature to call a special election, which they did. He then ran himself and won.
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It varies by state and most states have a different policy based on how long it is until the next election. In West Virginia Senate seats are handled differently than the House, being by appointment, depending on the amount of time between the primary and the vacancy.
He probably wouldn’t. Justice is pretty awful, but not as hard line as a lot of Republicans. More significantly the appointment of Senators in West Virginia requires the Governor to pick from a list of three people submitted by the party of the person who most recently held the seat. The party chair in WV is currently embroiled in scandal, but is a lifelong Democrat who has vocally campaigned against Trump.
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This latest statement will no doubt prompt the establishment Dems to further kowtow to his demands. They never learn.
And again, to those Beltway insider apologists who whinge “what choice do they have?” my answer remains:
Stop rewarding bad behaviour.
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Gritty details I did not know. Thank you! I am a native WVian, but left 25 years ago and have not kept up with it other than very superficially since.
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Or 1 Prominent Land Grant University, or a few Government Research Centers.
I love this idea, who’s ready to make this happen? I’m focused on keeping WI blue, but if we flipped Montana we could net PR and DC, and then the ball really starts rolling.
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Blocking policies that are popular among your constituents isn’t rare, sadly. There was a study a couple of years back that found almost no correlation between public opinion and what laws get enacted. There was plenty between corporate funding and what laws get enacted, of course.
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Go ask ALEC,
I think they’ll know.
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That’s a key point of those assholes’ (neoliberal, koch libertarian, paelolibertarian, classical liberal, ancap, etc) Public Choice Theory political thought of how politicians and bureaucrats will tend to favor special interest groups because it’s not their money.
It’s an interesting observation, maybe a good rule-of-thumb, but they build an entire philosophy of rational politics (aka political corruption) out of it like it was based on hard science.
(I suspect that some of those libertarian think-tanks carefully manage Wikipedia articles like this, so watch for biases and unstated assumptions.)
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Maryland stayed in the Union despite being a slave state. This means that the western counties (Washington, Allegany and Garrett), which are much more similar to neighboring West Virginia than to Baltimore or Annapolis, remained part of the state.
Last week, they asked to leave Maryland and join West Virginia…
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"(Gov) Justice and other West Virginia lawmakers hinged their pitch around their state’s lower taxes, highly permissive gun laws, anti-abortion politics and much looser approach to business and environmental regulations.
“We’re not going to stand there with red tape in the way,” Justice said. “We’re not gonna wrap you so tight with red tape you’d be rather Bubble Wrapped.”" -TheBaltimoreSun
They know who they are and Manchin does too. Polluting Greed Pigs.
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They breathe in all those fumes that make it very unlikely many of these coal miners will live past their 50’s in to their 60’s.
Hell, Coal Miners have their own division in Medicare to treat them. It’s called the Black Lung program. The only other workers who have a separate plan are RailRoad workers. But the miners want to keep up their family traditions. Work in the coal mine as soon as you can, breathe in all that toxic stuff, smoke a pack or so a day, get f’d up lungs and die within 20 years. But screw HRC who had the nerve to address job retraining with them!
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The craziest part (ok, one of the craziest parts) is that employment in coal mines has been declining significantly for decades, and there aren’t actually all that many coal jobs to be lost at this point. In West Virginia we’re only talking about 14000 jobs.
For perspective that’s just a quarter of the number of people who work at Disneyland.
It’s much more about the nostalgia for coal traditions and how the state wants to see itself than it is about actual jobs. And for this Joe is going to let the planet burn.
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