Sherrod Brown Blames Republicans for Sabotaging the Biden Agenda

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“The oil and gas lobby never loses in this town.”

“The oil and gas lobby never loses in this town,” Brown said. “They lose sometimes, but they never lose with Republicans.” Manchin’s opposition may have been the final nail in the coffin for Raskin’s nomination, but that was after 50 Republicans also opposed it. (Manchin has received more campaign donations from oil, coal, and gas industries than any other senator.)

In Brown’s view, Manchin’s opposition to the Raskin nomination should be viewed similarly to his skepticism of the expanded child tax credit. The West Virginia Democrat torpedoed the Build Back Better Act, Biden’s massive public investment and climate bill, in December, and had long raised concerns about the child tax credit. Democrats needed to approve the bill using the process of reconciliation, which would allow them to circumvent a Republican filibuster and pass the bill with a simple majority. With an evenly divided Senate and unified Republican opposition, that can only happen if all 50 Democrats are on board.

But Republicans received the lion’s share of Brown’s ire. “To put it on Joe Manchin, when all 50—it’s like the child tax credit. Fifty Republicans voted against the child tax credit twice,” Brown said, referring to the Senate’s votes on both the American Rescue Plan and its later attempt to pass the Build Back Better Act. The American Rescue Plan, passed along party lines last year, had expanded access to the credit to the lowest-income Americans, increased the amount of the credit, and disbursed it to families on a monthly basis. The expanded credit, which reached around 90 percent of the country’s children, expired at the end of 2021 and has yet to be renewed. Without it, the child poverty rate increased by five percentage points in January, with 3.7 million children in poverty due to its expiration.

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