- Manchin wants to aid Ukraine first before dealing with Biden's economic agenda.
- "Right now is how do we get Ukraine and make sure that Ukraine wins this war?" he told Insider.
- It threatens to stall Biden's economic agenda even further.
Sen. Joe Manchin's chief priority above all else for now: Helping Ukraine win its war against Russia. It may throw President Joe Biden's stalled economic agenda even further down the to-do list with time running out for Democrats to take it up before midterm campaigning starts in earnest.
"We're in a much different part in the world right now with the turmoil that we have," he told Insider on Tuesday. "Right now is how do we get Ukraine and make sure that Ukraine wins this war?"
The conservative Democrat said he wanted to secure final passage of a $40 billion financial and humanitarian aid package for Ukraine.
"We should be going what we call pedal to the metal back home in West Virginia, as hard as we can to help Ukraine," he told Insider. "We should be doing everything we can to make sure Ukraine can secure their country. And then we should all be gathering together in a Marshall Plan to help rebuild."
He repeated familiar demands about using reconciliation as a way to pay down the growing federal debt and to "get our financial house in order." Reconciliation is the procedure that Democrats employed to circumvent united GOP opposition, but it requires the party to march in lockstep in the 50-50 Senate.
The White House didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Last year, Manchin often threw cold water on the emerging Build Back Better legislation as it made its way through Congress. He raised other problems that he felt lawmakers should deal with first, such as the chaotic American withdrawal from Afghanistan, the ongoing pandemic, and worsening inflation.
He ultimately sank the bill in late December and Democrats haven't been able to revive a smaller social and climate spending package since then. Without his vote, their economic agenda is stalled in the upper chamber.
The conservative Democrat earlier this month convened a working group in an effort to strike a bipartisan energy deal. But those talks haven't yielded a breakthrough since Democrats and the GOP often harbor competing priorities on electric vehicles and other climate measures.
Manchin also reiterated his skepticism about incentivizing people to buy electric vehicles, raising the prospect of energy shortages comparable to the 1970s. He said he didn't want China to be in a position to block battery shipments to the US.
"I remember the 70s when I had to stand in line to buy gas because of OPEC had control over our transportation mode — because we'd become so dependent on oil," he said. "I don't want to be dependent on China."
The House-approved Build Back Better bill contained $550 billion in clean energy spending, some of it devoted to encouraging the domestic production of chips and EV batteries.