- Sen. Joe Manchin is prioritizing election reform and government funding over Biden's spending plan.
- "Those things are the highest priority we have right now," Manchin said on Tuesday.
- Democrats and Republicans have been laboring over a broader government funding bill since 2021.
Sen. Joe Manchin said Tuesday that his top priorities in the short-run would be funding the government and overhauling election laws before taking up any party-line social spending and climate package.
"Those things are the highest priority we have right now," Manchin told Politico earlier on Tuesday. "And we can still do more than two things."
He later elaborated that he wasn't part of "any organized discussion" except for overhauling the Electoral Count Act and efforts to strike a deal in a so-called omnibus package to keep the government's doors open through the year.
"We're going to spend all our time on that, and trying to get an omnibus bill for a budget," Manchin told reporters of his election reform push.
His comments suggest efforts to revive the stalled social spending and climate plan aren't going to produce a skinnier version of Biden's major domestic agenda anytime soon. He torpedoed the House-approved bill in December and declared it "dead" last week.
Manchin and GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine are leading a bipartisan group of 16 senators working on a broad range of election reform ideas centered around reforming the Electoral Count Act, the late 19th-century law that governs how Congress counts Electoral College votes and resolves potential disputes over which slates of electors to count.
The once-obscure law came into focus at the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021, when former President Donald Trump unsuccessfully pressured former VP Mike Pence to overturn the results, which he did not have the power to do.
Collins told reporters on Monday that the group's discussions were zeroing in on clarifying that the vice president's role during the electoral count is solely ceremonial and raising the threshold for members of Congress to object to electoral slates.
Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, another member of the group, told reporters he's particularly interested in determining how Congress can also constrain potential rogue political actors at the state level who could, for example, could submit a fraudulent slate of electors to Congress.
In recent weeks, Manchin has invested an enormous sum of time into negotiations on election reform instead of the Build Back Better plan. Without him, Senate Democrats can't pass any version of their social and climate spending package over Republican opposition in the 50-50 Senate.
Lawmakers are slated to pass a short-term package to fund the government through March 11 sometime in the next two weeks. Democrats and Republicans have labored to strike an agreement on a broader spending bill since early fall with few signs of a pending breakthrough.
The conservative West Virginia Democrat did open the door to backing a slimmer spending bill that cuts the federal deficit. The US government has run up a historically large deficit over the past year, spending far more than it collects in tax revenue as a result of emergency pandemic spending.
"That's the purpose we have in this," Manchin told Insider. "We have to basically get our financial house in order. That's open through reconciliation."
He previously told NBC News that the notion of putting some spending in the bill towards slashing the deficit was "music to my ears."
Manchin has repeatedly raised the mounting national debt as a reason to oppose the spending plan. Democrats argue that it will be fully offset with tax hikes on the wealthy and large corporations, but they will likely have to tailor any package to assuage Manchin's concerns.
Meanwhile, a group of Senate and House Democrats doubled down on urging the expanded child tax credit in a future design of their stalled social spending plan on Tuesday. The now-expired program has faced objections from Manchin due to its price tag and structure as a universal-child allowance, jeopardizing its odds of revival.
"The last thing we should be doing is cutting this child tax credit," Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado said at a news conference. "In my view, the last thing we should be doing is doubling childhood poverty, increasing hunger in the United States by 25%."
Manchin told reporters later on Tuesday he hadn't been involved in any discussions about reviving the benefit in a future spending package.