For the past year and a half, Senator Joe Manchin has been holding his fellow Democrats hostage.

Manchin repeatedly negotiated in bad faith to extract concession upon concession in his party’s once-ambitious plans to help everyday Americans combat the insatiable greed of Big Business and the fascistic march of Trumpism.

Similarly, after extended negotiations, he rejected a filibuster workaround that would have allowed the passage of desperately needed democracy protections.

And now Manchin is at it again.

The federal government will shut down if Congress can’t agree on funding legislation by September 30.

But Manchin is demanding that this must-pass bill include unrelated legislation — which appears to have been drafted by the American Petroleum Institute — to satisfy dirty energy and mining interests.

Not the least bit surprisingly, this includes a massive pipeline in West Virginia that would particularly harm low-income and indigenous communities.

Manchin, by the way, rakes in roughly $500,000 a year from his coal investments.

Ol’ Coal Joe is trying to force through a scheme that would require the government to make it easier for dirty energy companies to extract even more oil and “natural” gas out of the earth and pipe it all over the country.

Tell Senator Joe Manchin:

Stop holding your own party, the federal government, and our planet’s future hostage over your allegiance to dirty energy. The American people know that we need to move *away* from fossil fuels, not make it *easier* for Big Oil and dirty energy companies to keep doing business as usual, which has brought us to the brink of irreversible and catastrophic climate disruption. Knock it off.

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For progress,

- Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen

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