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He's undecided on the nominee to head Health and Human Services. He's not sure if he'll back the No. 3 for the Justice Department, or the undersecretary of policy at the Pentagon.

He says maintaining the 60 vote-requirement to overcome a filibuster is a "red line" for him. And he's made clear he'll block advancing an infrastructure package on a party-line vote if Democrats don't work with Republicans.

In a 50-50 Senate, with most members voting the party-line, Sen. Joe Manchin stands mostly alone

Mr. Manchin, however, does not see it that way. To the exasperation of Democrats, delight of Republicans and bewilderment of politicians who can’t understand why he wouldn’t want to wield more power, Mr. Manchin isn’t budging.

That puts Mr. Manchin, 73, at the center of the most important policy debates in Washington — and has set the stage for a collision between a party eager to use its majorities to pass sweeping legislation and a political throwback determined to restore bipartisanship to a chamber that’s as polarized as the country.

More broadly, Mr. Manchin’s resistance to ending the filibuster has ripened fundamental questions about which version of Congress would be more dysfunctional: a body stymied by gridlock or one that can pass legislation only by scrapping longstanding guidelines so it can push through party-line votes?

Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia raised new doubts on Monday about an emerging compromise on a $1.85 trillion climate change and social safety net bill, warning that he had serious reservations about the plan and criticizing liberals in his party for what he called an “all or nothing” stance on it

It came as congressional negotiators were closing in on a final deal on the social policy and climate legislation, which progressives have called a prerequisite to supporting a separate, $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill.

curb the rising cost of prescription drugs, which had been left out of an outline that Mr. Biden presented on Thursday. Negotiators had all but secured a compromise that would include a $2,000 annual cap on out-of-pocket prescription expenditures for older Americans,

Sen. Joe Manchin, a centrist Democrat from West Virginia, said Tuesday that he does not support the two gun safety bills the House passed earlier this month and instead is still pushing to pass the more narrow Manchin-Toomey compromise bill that he developed with Republican Sen. Pat Toomey -- but failed to pass -- after the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting.

Manchin's opposition underscores a major divide among Democrats over how to tackle gun control -- a key priority for their voters -- even as the party now controls Congress and the White House and faces intense pressure to take action in the wake of a massacre at a Colorado supermarket that left 10 dead, including a store manager and a police officer.

The chances the Senate could pass any gun legislation remain highly unlikely given that would require significant Republican support to overcome a filibuster.

President Biden laid blame Tuesday on two Democratic senators for Congress' failure to pass voting rights legislation, apparently a reference to Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.

"June should be a month of action on Capitol Hill," Biden said, as he appointed Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the White House’s efforts to expand voting rights.  Biden vowed to "fight like heck" to get the For the People Act, already passed by the House, through the Senate. 

But Manchin has voiced support for the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would require states with a record of discrimination in voting to pre-clear new voting restrictions with the federal government. 

Some defenders of the Senate's filibuster rules are reconsidering their past refusal to gut the potent stall tactic if Republicans carry through with their plans to block Democratic legislation to rewrite the nation's voting and campaign finance laws.

Democrats say they expect growing demands to change the filibuster rules later this month when the battle over voting rights heads to the Senate floor, hoping that the pressure will be enough to convince their party's most stalwart filibuster defender, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, to buckle and agree to gut the filibuster -- though he's showing no signs of caving.

One of them: Sen. Angus King, a Maine independent who has been among the handful of members in the Senate Democratic Caucus to embrace overhauling Senate filibuster rules to let legislation advance by a simple majority of 51 senators.

Although the story will be much more heroic if this bill or something like it passes into law, the achievement is already heroic, by bringing such legislation, in this country, even this close.

In less than five years, a new generation of activists and aligned technocrats has taken climate action from the don’t-go-there zone of American politics and helped place it at the very center of the Democratic agenda, persuading an old-guard centrist septuagenarian, Biden, to make a New Deal-scale green investment the focus of his presidential campaign platform and his top policy priority once in office

This, despite a generation of conventional wisdom that the issue was electorally fraught and legislatively doomed. Now they find themselves pushing a recognizable iteration of that agenda — retooled and whittled down, yes, but still unthinkably large by the standards of previous administrations — plausibly forward into law.

Senate rejects gun control amendments offered following San Bernardino shooting

The Senate on Thursday voted down two gun control proposals put forward by Democrats in response to this week’s deadly shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., in a series of votes that highlighted the intractable party divide over how to respond to gun violence.

Feinstein’s amendment was identical to legislation she previously filed on the same topic, while the expansion of background checks for gun purchases mirrored language championed by Sens. Manchin and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) in 2013, following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School three years ago this month.

There were two columns I wanted to write this week. One was about Senator Joe Manchin’s comments cracking the door open on filibuster reform. The filibuster “should be painful and we’ve made it more comfortable over the years,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Maybe it has to be more painful.” With those words — and, to be fair, a few more Delphic utterances, which I’ll get to shortly — Manchin reignited the possibility of filibuster reform and perhaps the restoration of the Senate.

The other was about the wave of new bills, proposals and laws across Republican-controlled states, restricting ballot access, making it harder to vote and undermining the fair administration of elections. In Georgia, SB241 would end no-excuse absentee voting, and HB531 would limit weekend voting. In Arizona, SB 1593 would shorten the early voting period and trash envelopes that weren’t postmarked at least five days before the election, and SB 1068 would give the highly partisan State Legislature more power over elections.

The core power imbalance in America is that Democrats win more people, Republicans win more places. In 2020, Joe Biden won 551 counties and 81 million votes. Donald Trump won 2,588 counties and 74 million votes. The Democrats’ advantage among people was enough to win power nationally, but the Republicans’ advantage in counties gave them control of more states. When the dust settled, Republicans held 61 state legislative chambers, compared with 37 for Democrats. There are 23 states where Republicans hold the lower house, the Senate and the governorship — a governing trifecta that eases the passage of highly partisan bills — but only 15 states where Democrats do the same.

Political wisdom might ordinarily dictate that a president in need of certain senators' votes not publicly scold those lawmakers in public.

It might also prevent a leader once labeled "sleepy" by his rival from escaping to the beach in the middle of the workweek for his wife's milestone birthday.

Yet President Joe Biden did both of those things this week, apparently unbothered with conventional politics or rote partisan backlash. Approaching the five-month mark of his presidency, Biden instead appears confident enough in his standing to discard certain unwritten rules of the job, even as he settles into a more traditional presidency than the norm-bending tenure of his predecessor.

For months, Democrats in Congress have remained united behind passing the For the People Act, legislation that would amount to the most sweeping protections for voting rights in a generation.

My colleague Daniel Strauss and I wrote about this quagmire for Democrats this week. We asked senators and voting rights groups how exactly they might win over Manchin and how they plan to move forward. They told us they were still optimistic about the bill’s prospects and they thought Manchin would ultimately come around as public pressure grew.

The Republican effort to review 2.1m ballots cast in Arizona’s largest county is getting even stranger. One of the subcontractors that was involved in running the audit is no longer participating, the Arizona Republic reported on Tuesday. The same firm had previously been hired by the non-profit of Sidney Powell, a Trump ally who promulgated lies about the 2020 election, to do an audit in Pennsylvania.

The 818-page bill would end partisan gerrymandering, tighten controls on campaign spending and ease voter registration. It would also force major-party candidates for president and vice president to release 10 years’ worth of personal and business tax returns and end the president’s and vice president’s exemption from conflict-of-interest rules, which allowed Mr. Trump to maintain businesses that profited off his presidency.

Under Senate rules, 60 votes are needed to end debate and break a filibuster on policy legislation. Republican and Democratic Senates have chipped away at the filibuster, ensuring that most executive branch appointees and judicial nominees can be confirmed with a simple 51-vote majority.

That decision freed nine states, mainly in the South, to change voting laws without pre-approval from Washington. After the 2020 election, many of those states — and several others — jumped at the chance, powered by the false claim that voting in November was rife with fraud.

I intended to duly fulfill my duty as a political columnist and write about the first 100 days of Joe Biden’s presidency

But as I talked to Senate Democrats about the past few months, I kept hearing a note of regret. Not about their agenda, or the bills they had passed or the nominations they had cleared. They were proud of all that. What saddened them was that their accomplishments, both past and prospective, depended on partisan strategies — party-line votes, the budget reconciliation process and, potentially, filibuster reform.

“The 2017 tax cut bill didn’t get a single Democratic vote in the House and Senate,” Senator Ron Wyden told me, disbelief in his voice. “You really have to work at it to not get a single Democratic vote for tax cuts. Everybody likes dessert!”

Neera Tanden's imperiled nomination to be President Joe Biden's budget director faces a major test Wednesday to see if she has enough support to win Senate confirmation amid bipartisan opposition.

Two Senate committees are expected to vote on whether to advance her nomination to the floor as Tanden faces resistance from Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, a centrist from West Virginia, and a wide array of Republicans, who have said they will not back her because of her past partisan criticisms

If Tanden's nomination stalls out, it would be the first defeat of a high-profile Biden pick subject to Senate approval

Implementation matters, but it’s harder to cover because it’s happening in all parts of the country simultaneously. There isn’t a huge Republican-Democratic fight over it, so there isn’t the conflict that draws the attention to it

we sort of implicitly treat policy like it’s this binary one-zero condition. One, you pass a bill, and the thing is going to happen. Zero, you didn’t, and it won’t.

ROBINSON MEYER: You can almost divide the law up into different kind of sectors, right? You have the renewable build-out. You have EVs. You have carbon capture. You have all these other decarbonizing technologies the law is trying to encourage

Among the first things you likely heard about the Inflation Reduction Act was its size.The bill, signed into law by President Biden on Tuesday, makes $369 billion in climate and energy investments — by far the largest such investment in American history.

But there are several ways to measure the size of a bill, and given how high the country’s emissions targets are, even many of the I.R.A.’s supporters will openly concede that it is, on its own, inadequate

it is ultimately how much carbon we put into the atmosphere and not how much solar power we produce that determines the future of warming. But the power of carrots also just reflects some new realities: To simplify radically, a 90 percent reduction in the cost of solar power over the last decade means that the same amount of money now goes ten times as far.

Republicans fear a 2018 GOP primary win by ex-con coal executive Don Blankenship may hurt their chances to knock off incumbent Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin. CNN's Dana Bash reports.

Republicans fear a 2018 GOP primary win by ex-con coal executive Don Blankenship may hurt their chances to knock off incumbent Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin. CNN's Dana Bash reports.

Photo: iStock/Getty Images By Joshua Jamerson Mar 1, 2018 7:18 am ET 0 COMMENTS Save Article Save Remove View Saved Articles <circ

He also dashed conservative hopes that he would support a move now for gun owners who legally carry concealed firearms in one state to carry them in the other 49 states, a long-sought goal of the National Rifle Association.

he bucked Republican orthodoxy by suggesting the swift removal of guns from people who are potentially mentally ill,

“This was sort of a loose group of senators who are basically still concerned about the deficit, concerned about expenditures, and trying to ensure if we’re going to be spending $1.9 trillion that it’s directed to the people who need the most,” said Sen. Angus King, a moderate independent from Maine who caucuses with Democrats, when asked about the strategy.

The outcome threatens to carry lasting political significance, raising questions as to whether moderates are content to tinker at the edges — or if the debate over coronavirus aid might embolden them to act more aggressively — as Biden proceeds with a fuller agenda to upgrade infrastructure, change tax laws and rethink immigration in the months to come.

Tester said obstruction is not the goal, stressing that an urgent need for coronavirus aid and other economic relief has driven Democrats to stick together. But, he acknowledged, the calculus may change for some lawmakers.

Readers discuss the lack of any Republican support for the Senate bill, despite wide public support.

Stimulus Win Shows Quest to Cooperate Is All but Lost,” by Carl Hulse (news analysis, March 7), proposed that bipartisanship is dead because party leaders could not work past partisan politics on the stimulus plan. While I agree that bipartisanship is dead, I believe that this is merely a symptom of a far bigger problem.Polls show that the American people overwhelmingly support President Biden’s stimulus plan. If the people of the country agree in a bipartisan way, but not the leaders, this shows a huge disconnect. Whom are the leaders representing?If the Republican leadership and centrist Democrats like Joe Manchin will not abide by the will of the people, we have a problem with representatives acting for party and self, not for the people.Christopher MartinezCoram, N.Y.To the Editor:Re “Democrats Trim Jobless Benefits in Stimulus Bill” (front page, March 6):Senate Democrats agreed to cut proposed unemployment benefits in President Biden’s stimulus bill from $400 to $300 a week in order to placate Senator Joe Manchin and other “moderates,” who feel that the larger amount is too generous for out-of-work Americans.

Ahhh, Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, doing the people’s work, forcing Senate clerks to read the 628-page stimulus bill aloud for no apparent reason other than to delay aid to millions of Americans, many of whom desperately need it to survive.