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      Texas woman who stormed Capitol says she was following Trump's orders

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      A Texas real estate agent who was part of the pro-Trump mob that attacked the US Capitol said on Monday she was just following the orders of Donald Trump even as she faced federal charges for her part in the insurrection.“I have no guilt in my heart,” Jenna Ryan told NBC News. “I’m glad I was there because I witnessed history. And I’ll never get the chance to do that again.”Ryan, who flew to Washington on a private jet, said she made the trip “in solidarity with President Trump”.“President Trump requested that we be in DC on 6 January,” she said. “So this was our way of going and stopping the steal.”Trump still insists the election was stolen by Joe Biden via massive electoral fraud, a baseless claim repeatedly thrown out of court and rubbished by the US Department of Justice and state Republican officials.Charged with inciting the violent assault on the Capitol, Trump was impeached for a second time. His supporters in the Republican party and rightwing media insist he did not do so, claims contradicted by Trump’s own words when he told supporters to “fight like hell”.“I listen to my president, who told me to go to the Capitol,” she told CBS in an earlier interview.Ryan told NBC her “biggest concern” at the rally before the Capitol attack was that “there were no porta-potties … Because I like to always know I have a bathroom nearby”.She subsequently left a trail of social media posts documenting her participation in the insurrection, including a picture next to a broken window and a video of her saying: “We’re armed and dangerous. This is just the beginning.”A Facebook live stream showed Ryan entering the Capitol, promoting her real estate business and saying: “We’re going to fucking go in here. Life or death.”Five people died as a result of the attack, including a police officer who confronted Trump supporters, a rioter shot by law enforcement and another Trump supporter who was crushed by the crowd.Ryan, who is also a life coach and radio host, faces charges of disorderly conduct and knowingly entering a restricted area.She told NBC that, though she joined a mob that broke into the Capitol, where some rioters ransacked offices and sought out lawmakers to kidnap and kill, some chanting “Hang Mike Pence”, she had not been advocating aggression.“If you look up the term ‘storm’, you can storm in the kitchen,” she said. “You can storm in and say, ‘No more’. I’m not storming in to kill people. What I meant, ‘life or death’, is if someone kills me, I will stand for my truth, even if someone kills me.”Like other members of the mob, Ryan has asked Trump for a pardon.It is unclear whether Trump will include any of the rioters in a list of about 100 people he plans to pardon in his last days in office. Allies have warned against it.Trump met with White House advisers including his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner to finalize the list. According to CNN it will probably include white-collar criminals and a high-profile rapper, among others.Ryan said she would not hold it against Trump if no pardon were forthcoming.“I’m going to support him no matter what he does,” she said. More

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      Josh Hawley finds new publisher after Simon & Schuster cancels book

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      The rightwing Missouri senator Josh Hawley has found a publisher for a book dropped by Simon & Schuster over his role in attempting to overturn the US election on the day of the Capitol riot – and Simon & Schuster will distribute it.The Tyranny of Big Tech will now be published by Regnery, a conservative press, in a deal first reported by the Federalist, a rightwing outlet.But under a distribution agreement announced in 2018, Simon & Schuster “handles distribution for Regnery titles in all markets and territories around the world” and “sales in Canada and export markets”.Simon & Schuster declined to comment.The publisher dropped Hawley’s book a day after the attack on the Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump left five dead. More than 100 arrests have been made, amid reports some rioters planned to kidnap and even kill lawmakers. Trump was impeached for a second time over the riot, charged with inciting it.Hawley was photographed raising a fist towards Trump supporters at the Capitol on the day of the riot. Later, with the Capitol in lockdown, he went through with his objections to electoral college results, in support of Trump’s claims the election was stolen, which have repeatedly been thrown out of court.Hawley faces growing calls for censure, even expulsion, by Senate leadership. Some donors have suspended contributions. As reported by the Guardian on Monday, one major Hawley donor, the billionaire Jeffrey Yass, has said he feels “deceived”.On dropping Hawley’s book, Simon & Schuster said: “We did not come to this decision lightly. As a publisher it will always be our mission to amplify a variety of voices and viewpoints: at the same time we take seriously our larger public responsibility as citizens, and cannot support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat to our democracy and freedom.”Hawley responded angrily, saying: “This could not be more Orwellian … Let me be clear, this is not just a contract dispute. It’s a direct assault on the first amendment … I will fight this cancel culture with everything I have. We’ll see you in court.”Simon & Schuster said it was “confident that we are acting fully within our contractual rights”.On Monday, the Federalist report about Hawley’s new deal accused Simon & Schuster of “quickly caving to a pressure campaign organized by leftist activists and making the Missouri Republican one of the highest-profile victims of cancel culture”.The report also channelled Republican defenses of Trump, referring to the insurrection at the Capitol as an “incursion” which it said was “the result of organized planning rather than impromptu incitement, as media and leftist activists had initially claimed”.Numerous rioters have been recorded, inside the Capitol and since the attack, saying they were following Trump’s instructions.“We are listening to Trump – your boss,” one told a police officer in remarks reported by the New Yorker. More

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      The Capitol riot wasn't a fringe 'uprising'. It was enabled by very deep pockets | Brendan O'Connor

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      While law enforcement officials in Washington ought to be held accountable for their alleged culpability in the deadly violence at the US Capitol earlier this month, and the off-duty cops and members of the military who participated in it ought to be disciplined, the attempted auto-coup cannot solely be understood through the lens of policing and security. At least as much responsibility lies with the billionaire donors and corporate interests – in other words, the capitalists – who made this moment possible.Already a picture of the individuals, organizations, and institutions who lent their weight to the movement that stormed Congress has begun to emerge. Last year, the secretive and influential Council for National Policy (CNP), which author Anne Nelson describes as “connecting the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of western plutocrats and the strategy of right-wing Republican political operatives,” called for state legislators in six swing states to reject Joe Biden’s election victory. CNP leaders were scheduled to speak at the rally on the morning of 6 January, where Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to march on the Capitol.Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, which has contributed millions to the Republican Attorneys General Association (Raga), listed as one of the participating organizations in the rally. Raga’s fundraising arm, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, sent robocalls encouraging Trump supporters to march on the Capitol ahead of the 6 January rally, at which the former chairman of Raga, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, spoke. But major donors to Raga include not only rightwing bogeymen like Koch Industries, Walmart, or the Adelson family but also household corporate names like Comcast, Amazon and TikTok.Likewise, although Koch Industries is the single largest corporate donor to Republican representatives who pledged to try to overturn the election results, the next biggest contributors included defense companies like Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon, as well as tech (Amazon) and finance (Goldman Sachs) and insurance (Aflac), according to the Center for Media and Democracy. And while Charles Koch has maintained a posture of personal ambivalence, verging on distaste, for Donald Trump, super Pacs heavily funded by the donor network he and his late brother founded have spent millions supporting congressional Republicans who rejected the outcome of the 2020 election.Dick Uihlein, the chief executive of the Uline shipping company and a contributor to the Koch donor network, spent at least $2m getting Josh Hawley elected to the US Senate and has contributed more than $4m to the Tea Party Patriots, another one of the 11 groups listed as participating in the Stop the Steal coalition. In 2019, more than $20m was funneled through DonorsTrust, a donor-advised fund that disguises the source of major giving to nonprofits, to a dozen organizations that would ultimately contest the integrity of the 2020 presidential election, including $103,000 to Tea Party Patriots. In a statement provided to the Intercept, Tea Party Patriots cofounder Jenny Beth Martin denied spending any money on the Stop the Steal rally and condemned the violence that occurred.Investigative journalists will continue to trace and disentangle the funding networks that facilitated 6 January. The list of names will grow longer; the sum of individual and corporate contributions greater. But already it is clear that what happened at the Capitol was not just the unintended consequence of specific capitalists’ ill-advised campaign donations; it was an expression of a deeper, ongoing crisis of capitalism, and the ruling class’s (sometimes contradictory) attempts to manage that crisis.According to a report released late last year by the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness, the 651 billionaires in the United States added more than $1tn to their collective wealth since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, bringing the total to slightly more than $4tn. Meanwhile, the racialized distribution of labor in the United States – the concentration of workers of color in both essential industries, where they are more likely to be exposed to the pandemic, and service and hospitality industries, where layoffs have been rampant – means that Black, Latino, and Native Americans are significantly more likely to be hospitalized and die of Covid-19 than non-Hispanic white Americans. This serves as a stark reminder of the white supremacist character of the decades-long effort to defang and declaw the American labor movement – an effort funded and organized by the same far-right capitalists who laid the groundwork for 6 January.The Capitol siege was just one battle in an ongoing, decades-long assault on democracy. Racist ideologues have served as the vanguard, but they have long been supported (sometimes openly, often tacitly) by a wide swathe of capitalists. The ultranationalist Maga diehards, Qanon cultists, and various fascists that stormed the Capitol are shock troops searching for a leader. Trump will likely prove too self-absorbed, too cowardly, and too lazy for the job. But no matter how many arrests are made or officials fired, the tide of history has returned us to the rocky shores of political violence and mass upheaval. More

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      How the Republican voter fraud lie paved the way for Trump to undermine Biden’s presidency

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      When an American president is inaugurated, it’s supposed to mark the height of American democracy and power. The elaborate ceremony is designed to convey the peaceful transfer of power and that no matter how bitter the election, the nation is moving on.But when Joe Biden is inaugurated as the 46th US president on Wednesday, the ceremony will seem anything but that. America is arriving at the inauguration at an incredibly perilous moment, just two weeks after a violent pro-Trump mob attacked the US Capitol and several Republican members of Congress voted against certifying the results of the election. For months, Donald Trump has refused to acknowledge Biden as the legitimate winner of the election – a belief shared by legions of his supporters. The ceremony will have a heavy military presence because of threats of violence. Trump isn’t bothering attending.While Trump has accelerated this dangerous moment, it’s been shaped by a deliberate Republican strategy to undermine faith in elections to make it harder to vote. The myth of voter fraud and repeated allusions to elections being stolen have moved from fringe theories to the center of Republican ideology over the last several decades. The refusal to accept the election, and the attack on the Capitol, are a consequence of that strategy.“Donald Trump was definitely the spark and he had many enablers and facilitators, but the kindling had all been laid,” said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The strategy has been to slowly, steadily, undermine Americans’ faith in the security of elections, increase their belief in the existence of widespread voter fraud so as to enable them to accept what would otherwise be perceived as a really illegitimate and anti-democratic agenda of restricting access to voting.”For years, Republicans have used misleading and faulty data to suggest that elections are at risk of fraud. In Kansas, Kris Kobach, the former secretary of state, used the threat of non-citizen voting to justify a law requiring people to prove their citizenship when they registered to vote (the law has since been blocked by a federal court). Conservative lawyers in recent years have also used misleading data analyses to suggest that voter rolls are filled with ineligible voters.By 2016, when Trump claimed that voter fraud cost him the popular vote, it fit neatly into the narrative the Republican party was beginning to embrace.Two years later, there were signs that questioning election results were moving to Republican orthodoxy. Paul Ryan, then serving as speaker of the House, said it was “bizarre” and “weird” that Republicans fell behind in California races as more mail-in ballots were counted after election night. When Trump started making similar claims last spring and summer that mail-in ballots would lead to fraud and cost him the election, few Republicans objected.The party began to attack ballot drop boxes and mail-in voting, something Republicans long relied on. When Trump claimed there was something amiss as states continued to count ballots after election day, Republicans – with a few exceptions – supported him too. The rhetoric began to have real consequences, as supporters started protesting at vote counting sites and harassing workers trying to count ballots during November’s election.And by the time of electoral college certification, the effort to undermine faith in the vote had gone so far that it made it possible for two-thirds of the House Republican caucus and a dozen senators to back the idea of throwing out the election results entirely.“It’s gone from voter fraud in a particular election to ‘stolen election’,” said Lorraine Minnitte, a professor at Rutgers University-Camden, who has studied allegations of voter fraud. “I don’t think it would have been as successful if the fraud myth hadn’t been planted a long time ago.”Kobach, a Trump ally who briefly led a White House panel to investigate voter fraud, said it was “entirely appropriate” for members of Congress to object to the certification of electoral college votes. He noted that since 2000, Democrats had objected repeatedly to the counting of electoral college votes for Republican presidential winners (in all of those cases, however, the effort was not supported by the Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, who had already conceded the race).He dismissed the idea that there was any connection between raising concerns about election fraud and the attack on the Capitol.“I’ve talked about voter fraud to small audiences and very, very large audiences over 100 times. Maybe multiple hundreds of times. Never has it inflamed passions so that people want to go march on something and break windows,” he told the Guardian. “The idea that talking about the integrity of our elections is inflammatory is idiotic.”Kobach, who built a national reputation by focusing on voter fraud, also downplayed the significance of a Biden presidency in which a significant number of people do not accept him as a legitimately elected figure.“I would say it’s going to be very similar to the last four years where you had many on the left thinking Donald Trump wasn’t legitimately elected because they believed Russian interference caused him to be elected,” he said. “You will have many on the right harboring doubts as to whether the results in those five states were accurate accounts of legal votes in those five states, but I don’t think it’s going to be all that different.”Hillary Clinton conceded the election to Trump the day after the polls closed in 2016.Since last week’s electoral college vote, several businesses have announced they are pausing donations to the Republican members of Congress who voted against upholding election results. The pause comes after business interests for years have supported conservative groups that have facilitated voter ID laws and extreme partisan gerrymandering that allowed Republicans to take votes without fear of the consequences.“People were willing to tolerate this anti-democratic conduct up to a point. And then when it boiled over, when it became so extreme that people couldn’t ignore it, then they became willing to repudiate it,” Weiser said. “Seeing it so vividly all at once has broken that complacency.”Biden will be inaugurated on Wednesday on the Capitol’s west front amid a growing rejection of that complacency. But convincing Trump’s supporters that the election was legitimate and overcoming the doubt sowed in American elections may be an impossible task. We may have only begun to see the consequences of the damage. More

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      Billionaire backer feels 'deceived' by Josh Hawley over election objections

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      A secretive billionaire supporter of Josh Hawley and other rightwing lawmakers suggested he had been “deceived” by the Republican senator from Missouri, who led the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.Jeffrey Yass is a co-founder of Susquehanna International Group – headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a critical swing state – who has donated tens of millions of dollars to hardline Republican groups who supported Donald Trump’s effort to invalidate his defeat at the polls by Joe Biden.Yass privately told a longtime associate he had not foreseen how his contributions would lead to attempts to overturn US democracy.“Do you think anyone knew Hawley was going to do that?” Yass wrote to Laura Goldman, a former stockbroker who has known him for more than three decades.“Sometimes politicians deceive their donors.”Yass, who does not give interviews and generally avoids publicity, also told Goldman he did not believe the 2020 election had been “stolen”, even though he has directly and indirectly supported rightwing Republicans who have repeatedly – and falsely – sought to discredit the results.The latest fallout of the 6 January attempt to invalidate the election, in which 147 Republicans in Congress objected to electoral college results in the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol, comes as both Hawley and his donors face pressure and criticism for his role.Hawley has said he objected to the counting of electoral votes in order to instigate a “debate” on the issue of election integrity. He has denied that his actions helped to incite the violent outburst and breach of the Capitol in which five people died, including a police officer.Goldman told the Guardian she emailed Yass because she was upset to learn about his support for Hawley and other Republicans, especially since the lawmakers were seeking to invalidate the election results in their home state, Pennsylvania, which helped Biden clinch the White House.“I approached Jeff Yass upset after reading the Guardian’s article [about his involvement in donations] because I was shocked he would allow my vote and the vote of his neighbors to possibly be invalidated by politicians to whom he gives millions of dollars,” she said.She added: “Yass lives here. He knows local politicians … he could simply call them and ask questions if he thought the election results were funky, which they absolutely were not. He doesn’t need Josh Hawley, a senator from Missouri, or Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas, to question the election results in the state that he has lived almost 40 years.”Goldman published snippets of Yass’s private remarks to her on Twitter. The Guardian was able to verify the authenticity of the statements.Yass, a trader and poker aficionado who is an active Republican donor and has been a force in Pennsylvania elections, donated about $30m to conservative Super Pacs in the 2020 election cycle, making him the eighth-largest donor in the election, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.Most of those donations were made to the Club for Growth, an anti-tax group that in 2018 and 2020 supported 42 Republican hardliners who ultimately voted to overturn election results even after insurrectionists stormed the US Capitol.The Club for Growth has been a major back of both Hawley and Cruz, his partner in seeking to invalidate the election.Yass has not responded to requests for comment from the Guardian. Nor has he responded to questions about whether he will continue to donate to the Club for Growth or whether he discussed issues with Hawley and others. Goldman said she sought out a discussion with him in part because she knows he is a “hands on” political donor.The Club for Growth did not respond to a request for comment. The group’s president, David McIntosh, has been an avid supporter of some of most anti-democratic lawmakers elected in 2020, including Lauren Boebert, a QAnon follower and gun rights advocate from Colorado who has been criticized for tweeting the location of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, during the riot in the Capitol, against the advice of police.In an endorsement of Boebert in July 2020, McIntosh lauded the the restaurant owner and political novice for her understanding of the “irreparable harm” caused by “government overreach” and said he had no doubt Boebert would be a “conservative firebrand” in Washington.Yass told Goldman he donated to the Club for Growth a year ago and suggested he could not have anticipated what Hawley and others might do.But public records show Yass also donated $2.5m to the Protect Freedom Pac on 10 November 2020, a week after the US election. The Protect Freedom Pac, affiliated with the Kentucky Republican senator Rand Paul, ran advertisements against Democrats ahead of two January runoff elections in Georgia, including ads that claimed Democrats were seeking to defund the police, institute “socialist healthcare” and raise “trillions in new taxes”.The Protect Freedom Pac’s website currently – and falsely – states that Democrats “stole” the 2020 election and used the Covid-19 crisis to illegally change election laws. It has also endorsed an in-person voter ID law, a policy that would disproportionately block minority voters.Yass has received far less attention than other billionaire donors, such as Mike Bloomberg or the late Sheldon Adelson, but has been known to get involved in local politics, donating money to candidates who support charter schools.Goldman told the Guardian Yass has been a longtime supporter of the Republican majority in the Pennsylvania legislature that led the fight to stop mail-in ballots from being counted until election day. Pennsylvania’s final results were not known until days after the election and Biden’s victory was clinched in large part because of hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots that were counted after in-person ballots.Hawley’s office did not respond to a request for comment. More

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      Biden will appeal for unity as US braces for violence by Trump supporters

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      Joe Biden will deliver a message of national unity when he assumes the presidency on Wednesday, seeking to begin healing a country fractured by the acrimony of Donald Trump’s administration and ongoing threats of violence by his supporters.The preview of the theme of Biden’s inauguration address came as cities across the US braced for violent protests and Washington DC resembled a fortress with up to 25,000 national guard troops deployed.“It’s a message of moving this country forward, it’s a message of unity, it’s a message of getting things done,” Ron Klain, the incoming White House chief of staff, told CNN’s State of the Union.“There’s no question we’ve seen the most divisive four years in over a century from President Trump, it’s one reason Joe Biden ran, to restore the soul of America. The events of the past few weeks have proven out just how damaged the soul of America has been, and how important it is to restore it. That work starts on Wednesday.”Biden will act quickly to reverse many of Trump’s most controversial policies, Klain said, beginning with a 10-day flurry of executive orders that will return the US to the Paris climate agreement and Iran nuclear deal, aim to speed the delivery of Covid-19 vaccines and erase the immigration ban on Muslim-majority countries.The promise of new beginnings, however, is set against the backdrop of threats of domestic terrorism this weekend and around the inauguration. Throughout the day on Sunday, small groups of rightwing protesters gathered outside statehouses across the country, outnumbered by national guard troops and police. By late afternoon Sunday, no incidents were reported. There was an attack on our people. This was the most terrible crime ever by a president against our countryThe Washington DC mayor, Muriel Bowser, told NBC’s Meet the Press she was concerned about several areas of her city following FBI warnings of armed individuals heading there, and to state capitals, bent on repeating the insurrection that left five dead when a mob incited by Trump overran the US Capitol on 6 January.With the massive national guard presence in Washington, and federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies including the Secret Service working with local police, Bowser said she was confident Wednesday’s inauguration would be “a safe event”.But, she said, “this will be an inauguration unlike any other. It was already destined to be given Covid concerns and limited seating and public access. But having our fellow Americans storm the Capitol, in an attempt to overthrow the government, certainly warrants heightened security.”Adam Schiff, the Democratic chair of the House intelligence committee, likened the scene in Washington to Baghdad’s Green Zone, “with so much military presence and barricades”.“I never thought I would see that in our own capital or that it would be necessary, but there was a profound threat from domestic violent extremists of the nature we saw on 6 January,” he said told CBS’s Face the Nation.“There are people coming to the Washington DC area that are bringing weapons, and we see threats to all 50 state capitals. There will be gatherings of individuals and those gatherings could turn violent, so there’s a very high level of risk.”An FBI bulletin warned of the likelihood of violence from armed protesters in Washington and every state capital between 16 and 20 January, Trump’s last day in office. The president, impeached for the second time for inciting the Capitol attack with lies about a stolen election, remained isolated and silent in the White House on Sunday, reportedly assembling a legal team for his Senate trial.Christopher Wray, the FBI director, outlined on Thursday threats by rightwing agitators including QAnon and white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys.“We are seeing an extensive amount of concerning online chatter,” he said. “One of the real challenges is trying to distinguish what’s aspirational versus what’s intentional.”As a precaution, Capitol buildings were boarded up and extra law enforcement resources deployed in numerous states. On Saturday, Washington police arrested a Virginia man found with a fake inaugural ID, a loaded handgun and ammunition. The man later told the Washington Post the he had been working security in the capital all week and pulled up to the checkpoint after getting lost. He told the paper he forgot the gun was in his truck and denied having so much ammunition. He was released after an initial court appearance and is due back in court in June, records show.“We have intelligence that there’s going to be activity around our capital and capitals across the country,” Asa Hutchinson, the Republican governor of Arkansas, told Fox News Sunday. “We’re taking necessary precautions to protect our capital and our citizens. I know some governors have beefed up even more, but I think the deterrent value hopefully has diminished that threat level.”In Washington, a large area including the White House, the Capitol, the National Mall and several blocks on either side was sealed off by thousands of national guard troops. High steel fences on concrete stands protected government buildings.In the run-up to the inauguration, troops from DC and neighbouring states will garrison the city. By several measures, it is a bigger response than the aftermath of 9/11. Large numbers of soldiers resting in the corridors of the Capitol, have not been seen since the civil war.The protected area was divided into a highly restricted “red zone” and around that a “green zone” accessible to residents, an echo of the Iraq war, and the fortified government and diplomatic area in central Baghdad.By lunchtime on Sunday, the city was quiet, with white supremacist militia leaders telling followers to stay away.In an email to supporters on Thursday, Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, joined other extremists in begging Trump to declare martial law. But he also told supporters they should not gather at state capitols, warning them of “false-flag traps”.Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the neo-fascist Proud Boys, told USA Today his group was not mobilising, saying: “I feel like this part of the battle is over.”A majority of respondents in a USA Today/Suffolk poll published on Sunday said they were still expecting violence.Trump was consumed on Sunday with his Senate trial for “incitement of insurrection”, which could begin as early as Wednesday afternoon.Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman from Maryland and the lead impeachment manager, gave a moving interview to CNN in which he recalled the Capitol riot and remembered his son Tommy, who died on New Year’s Eve at the age of 25.“When we went to count the electoral college votes and [the Capitol] came under that ludicrous attack, I felt my son with me and I was most concerned with our youngest daughter and my son in law, who is married to our other daughter, who were with me that day and who got caught in a room off of the House floor,” he said.“In between them and me was a rampaging armed mob, that could have killed them easily. These events are personal to me. There was an attack on our country, there was an attack on our people.“This was the most terrible crime ever by a president of the United States against our country.”Reuters contributed to this report. More

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      Joe Manchin: the conservative Democrat with leverage in a split Senate

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      There’s a meme going around concerning Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. It shows a futuristic city of gleaming skyscrapers and flying cars and an accompanying caption that reads something like: “West Virginia after Manchin has used all the leverage he has in the next Congress.”In other words, people expect Manchin, one of the most conservative Democrats in the federal government, to wield power like never before thanks to the 50-50 split in the Senate left by Democrats’ double win in the Georgia runoff races.Manchin, a three-term senator and former governor of West Virginia, is the most well-known of a set of moderate Republicans and Democrats who can decide whether to slow down legislation to a crawl or open a pathway to it becoming law.“There is going to be an important role for him to play as a moderate-to-conservative Democrat regardless of who won control of the Senate,” said Nick Rahall, a former Democratic congressman from West Virginia.Democrats have the slimmest of majorities in the Senate. The divide is Democrats control 50 seats and Republicans control 50 seats, which means when Kamala Harris becomes vice-president and her replacement, Alex Padilla of California, is sworn in as senator, Harris will be the tie-breaking vote.That slim majority can only go so far, though. Lawmakers need 60 votes for all legislation except reconciliation bills, which are annual and meant for tax and spending bills only. But all nominations before the Senate go strictly on a majority vote.There is going to be an important role for him to play as a moderate-to-conservative Democrat regardless of who won control of the SenateStill, Manchin’s reputation as being as right-leaning a Democrat as possible right now means that his support or opposition can provide cover to other lawmakers who also might want to influence Biden’s agenda. Manchin also maintains public friendships across the political spectrum. In an age where bipartisanship is rare, Manchin endorsed Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican, ahead of her re-election campaign. Collins then beat her Democratic challenger, Sara Gideon, in an upset.Manchin is part of a dying breed of Democrats out of West Virginia. He is the only statewide elected Democrat in the increasingly conservative-leaning red state. A Democratic presidential candidate has not won the state in over two decades and Donald Trump beat Joe Biden there by almost 40% of the vote.Manchin’s roots in West Virginia are deep. He grew up in coal country, one of five children and rose through the state’s politics first through the West Virginia house of delegates, then the state senate, then the secretary of state’s office, then the governor’s mansion, then the Senate.Nick Casey, a former chief of staff to the West Virginia governor, Jim Justice, said Manchin’s political career has been characterized by making decisions based on “what he thought were in the absolute interest of the people of West Virginia or the people of West Virginia and the people of the United States”.“He’s always been responsible, moderate and I don’t think ideologically driven at all,” Casey said.Manchin is the perfect example of a red state politician who styles himself as a different kind of Democrat in a party where the progressive wing can often generate eye-catching headlines.In 2010 Manchin aired a campaign ad in which he literally shot the text of a cap-and-trade bill while vowing to oppose certain parts of then-president Barack Obama’s signature Obamacare bill. In a sign of how important the landmark healthcare bill became to all corners of the Democratic party in 2018, during his second regular Senate re-election campaign, the West Virginia senator this time shot an anti-Obamacare lawsuit.More recently, Manchin has reinforced his trademark conservative Democrat identity by keeping some wiggle room on $2,000 stimulus checks to Americans making $75,000 or less. Manchin’s murkiness has spurred Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the liberal congresswoman from New York, to set up a political action committee to embrace $2,000 checks.“The Pac – No Excuses Pac – is intended to defend the Democratic agenda of Joe Biden, the Build Back Better plan, from the fringes of the Democratic party like Joe Manchin,” said Corbin Trent, the co-founder of the Pac. “Make no mistake, he is the fringes of the Democratic party.”Another potential flashpoint for Manchin in the months ahead concerns the Senate committee on energy and natural resources, where Manchin is the ranking member and poised to become chairman when Democrats regain the Senate majority.Even with a Democratic president prioritizing climate change Manchin is poised to split with other members of his party on the climate crisis and the gas industry. In a headline Inside Climate News wrote of Manchin “The Senate’s New Point Man on Climate Has Been the Democrats’ Most Fossil Fuel-Friendly Senator”.Make no mistake, he is the fringes of the Democratic partyManchin is one of a handful of centrist senators from both parties expected to take center sage during major policy debates over the next few years: Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly of Arizona, the Rev Rafael Warnock of Georgia, Angus King and Susan Collins of Maine, Jon Tester of Montana and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.“I think Joe Manchin will be a part of the influence on critical decisions but I think it will be a group of moderates that talk to each other on a regular basis,” said the former senator Joe Donnelly of Indiana. “The fact that Susan Collins is a Republican and Joe Manchin is a Democrat, those are party titles. It doesn’t in any way reflect the relationships that have developed in the Senate over the years. People like Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins and Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema – other people who are fairly moderate in her views – have developed real friendships.” More