Remember the Story of the Frog and the Scorpion?*

When a handful of us in the House warned this would happen if Dem leaders gave Manchin everything he wanted 1st by moving BIF before BBB instead of passing together, many ridiculed our position.

Maybe they’ll believe us next time. Or maybe people will just keep calling us naïve. https://t.co/TtKW6VOOCF

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 19, 2021

Nailed it months ago

So, after getting almost everything that he wanted from the Democrats in the Senate, he has announced that he can't vote for Build Back Better, because Democrats are not sufficiently nice to him, and because, as he has stated privately that he believes that recipients of the child tax credit will, "Spend their money on drugs."^†

I do not know why the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) spends their time trusting people with no integrity.

It's almost like they are playing to lose:

The declaration from Senator Joe Manchin III that he cannot support his party’s $2.2 trillion Build Back Better bill has significantly dimmed the prospects for the climate action that scientists say the United States must take to avert the most catastrophic effects of global warming.

Mr. Manchin, who comes from the coal-rich state of West Virginia and personally profits from his family’s coal brokerage, has received more campaign donations from the oil, coal and gas industries than any other senator in the current election cycle.

He first expressed his opposition to the legislation in an interview on Fox News Sunday, and then released a follow-up statement that echoed industry objections to its climate and clean-energy provisions, saying they “risk the reliability of our electric grid and increase our dependence on foreign supply chains.”

As the swing Democratic vote in an evenly split Senate where all Republicans are opposed to the legislation, Mr. Manchin is in the unique position of deciding whether the bill can pass.

So, no child tax credit, which has reduced child poverty in the US by about 40%, and no child care subsidies, which means that women cannot go to work, and diabetics will still have to spend over $1,000.00 a month to survive.

For Manchin, I'm sure, that last one is a feature not a bug, since his daughter is currently being sued, and should be criminally prosecuted, for colluding with the CEO of Pfizer to raise the price of Epipens. 

Frog marching these two out of their offices in handcuffs would have a rather salutary effect on people's faith in both the criminal justice and political systems in the United States.

^*The story goes as follows, "A scorpion asks a frog to carry him over a river. The frog is afraid of being stung, but the scorpion argues that if it did so, both would sink and the scorpion would drown. The frog then agrees, but midway across the river the scorpion does indeed sting the frog, dooming them both. When asked why, the scorpion points out that this is its nature."

^†As Anna Russell would say, "I'm not making this up, you know."