Republican Pat Toomey Insists Dems Took Joe Manchin ‘to the Cleaners’
Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) had no kind words on Sunday for Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin’s surprise decision to back a reconciliation bill set to revive Democrats’ domestic agenda.
“It really looks to me like Joe Manchin has been taken to the cleaners,” Toomey told CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union, attacking the bill’s provisions on corporate taxes, health-care subsidies, and climate change funds.
“And what does Joe get for this? He gets the promise that someday in the future, they’ll pass some kind of legislation about energy infrastructure,” he said. “So this is a disaster. This is going to make our recession worse. It’s gonna make inflation worse. It’s not going to do any good. I’m really surprised that Joe agreed to this.”
Toomey’s criticism mirrored that of several of his Republican colleagues after Manchin revealed his surprise support for the Inflation Reduction Act last week, a $700 billion bill that partly funds some of President Joe Biden’s top domestic priorities on climate and the corporate tax rate. Some within the GOP, who worked with Democrats on a semiconductor bill without knowing this was coming, likened it to a betrayal.
“How can we negotiate in good faith, compromise where necessary, and get things done together after the majority leader and the senator from West Virginia pull a stunt like this?” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) fumed on the Senate floor on Thursday. “To look you in the eye and tell you one thing and to do another is absolutely unforgivable.”
Toomey also defended his party’s response to the bill, saying its climate provisions in particular weren’t doing much to combat climate change, despite some of the most moderate Democrats—such as rural-adjacent Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA)—publicly supporting the bill.
“What’s having a few more rich people buying Teslas going to do? It’s going to do nothing,” Toomey said. “What we need is a strong economy and the ability to find the innovation and the technology that will allow us on a massive commercial scale to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. But these gestures—they may feel good, but they’re not an accomplishment.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Toomey chastised Democrats—and comedian Jon Stewart—for their intense push for a veterans’ relief bill, which Republicans blocked after initially supporting it.
“This is the oldest trick in Washington,” Toomey claimed. “People take a sympathetic group of Americans—and it could be children with an illness, it could be victims of crime, it could be veterans who have been exposed to toxic chemicals—craft a bill to address their problems, and then sneak in something completely unrelated that they know could never pass on its own and dare Republicans to do anything about it because they know they’ll unleash their allies in the media and maybe a pseudo-celebrity to make up false accusations to try to get us to just swallow which shouldn’t be there.“
The element Toomey referred to was how the funds would be allocated, particularly as the funds would be placed under a “mandatory spending” provision. That provision was intact when the bill initially cleared the Senate 84-14.
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