SOUTHERN WEST VIRGINIA – Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) put the brakes on President Biden’s multi-trillion dollar social spending bill before Christmas.
One poll shows 61 percent of West Virginians support his stand.
CBN News traveled to the Mountain State to hear what they have to say.
West Virginia voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in the last election, so it’s easy to see why people in small towns like Beckley would applaud Manchin’s no vote against the Build Back Better measure despite the fact that he’s a Democrat.
It also shows Manchin wants to keep his job.
“Don’t you just love anyone who is a gadfly and thorn in the side of the Washington establishment? The fact that the federal government has never shown itself to be able to do the things that it needs to do efficiently and for someone to put their hand up and say “Wait a minute. Let’s take our time with this,'” said Kevin Traube, owner of The Chocolate Moose in Beckley. “And you know how frustrated it makes them and how they gnash their teeth because unfortunately, they are more about their reelection than they are about actually helping people is really a thing of beauty.”
“I have mixed feelings,” Paul Roop of the Roop Law Office in Beckley told CBN News. “I feel that there is a role for the government in infrastructure repair that is very important and needed. I believe that Senate Democrats are opposed to independent thinking. And that’s what Senator Manchin has done. I’m not always in agreement with his decisions. This time I am.”
The fact that Manchin is increasingly at odds with his party has many West Virginians wondering why he doesn’t just become a Republican.
“My granddaddy was a Democrat. My daddy was a Democrat. I was a Democrat all my life, but now I feel that the best way to be a good Democrat is to become a Republican because they are where the Democrats used to be,” noted West Virginia resident Dave Hutchison.
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