President Joe Biden told a crowd in Tulsa on Tuesday that it wasn’t exactly his fault that Congress wasn’t passing more of his agenda.
„I hear all the folks on TV saying, why didn’t Biden get this done,“ said Biden. „Well, because Biden only has a majority of, effectively, four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.“ (Sidebar: Terrific use of the third person there by Biden. Chris Cillizza approves.) Now, Biden didn’t name any names. But, it’s pretty clear that the two senators he is referring to are Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. And, yes, there’s no question that Manchin and Sinema are the two most likely Democrats to side with Republicans when it comes to critical votes. Both senators are, for example, opposed to abolishing the legislative filibuster. But is Biden right? Do Manchin and Sinema, as he said, „vote more with my Republican friends?“ Not really — although it’s worth noting that there’s no perfect measure. VoteView, which analyzes the relatively liberal/moderate/conservative positioning of each senator in relation to one another, makes clear that while Manchin and Sinema are the most moderate of the 50 Democrats in the Senate in the 117th Congress, they are not all that close to having voted with Republicans more often.
