Moderate West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin took another potshot at his party and President Joe Biden over energy policies following several major rail disasters, some of which have involved the spillage of highly toxic chemicals.
Manchin made the remarks during a CBS News interview Sunday with Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation,” while talking about the recent train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, the Daily Wire reported.
“It’s time for us to get serious about this. We’re moving many, many products, many more products on the rails and on our roads than we ever did before. And we have a lot of people who don’t want any pipelines. Pipelines would help alleviate a lot of this problem with the oil that we need in our country and we will be using for quite some time to do it safer,” he said.
“But out of sight, out of mind. They are thinking, if you don’t have a pipeline, you won’t be using the product. Well, that’s far from the truth. And this is the results of people just not making good decisions. And it’s what’s broken in West Virginia and broken across the country as far as in Washington, the politics,” he continued.
Brennan noted that the former West Virginia governor also recently gave a “fiery speech” on the floor of the Senate which put him at odds with the White House and many in the Democrat Party over their “out-of-control spending and are refusing to negotiate.”
He said the country’s top priority should be returning to “normal” following two years of pandemic policy.
“We’ve gone from $3.5 trillion in spending to over $6.2 trillion in spending every year,” Manchin said. “That’s just unacceptable. You’ve got to sit down. Anybody that thinks we don’t have a problem in Washington, anybody that thinks that the politics is not broken in Washington is not living in reality, does not want to face the facts and the truth.”
Manchin declared that the United States no longer has a budget, and that Biden is currently infringing on American law by failing to release his budget, which is already one month overdue.
“We’ve got a runaway debt. We got inflation that’s killing people,” Manchin said. “We’ve got an unsecured energy. We have a border that’s out of control.”
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