In a development that’s sure to surprise more than a few people who pay attention to what’s happening in Congress, U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper is apparently a secret member of Manchinema.
Or so the Denver Post would like us to believe.
The Post published a long profile of Hickenlooper on Friday that attempts to paint Hickenlooper as the “same old moderate” he’s allegedly always been.
What they failed to mention is that Hickenlooper spent his first year in Congress voting with President Biden 100% of the time.
That’s right. On literally every single Senate vote where the Biden administration expressed a clear stance, Hickenlooper voted with Biden.
Hickenlooper and U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet’s perfect Biden scores are quite impressive considering their lockstep support for the White House’s agenda exceeds even that of Democrat Senate Leader Chuck Schumer.
Considering Democrats’ vast investment ($57 million) in a guy who said he didn’t really want the job, it’s not like Hickenlooper really has a lot of room to maneuver, even if that means “eviscerating the Senate” (as Biden once put it) to nuke the filibuster.
Remarkably, Hickenlooper told the Denver Post he had reservations about the underlying bill to federalize elections Democrats were trying to abolish the filibuster to pass.
He voted for the legislation and fought hard, eventually calling publicly for limits on Senate use of the filibuster power that Republican opponents were threatening to block legislation. But, looking back now, he said the bill had ballooned to 750 pages, too long, including costly burdens on states to conduct election system audits. Even some Democrats weren’t satisfied. Hickenlooper said opponents had a point and that he would have preferred a more narrowly tailored bill.
That’s a far cry from his statement in December when Hickenlooper framed his support for nuking the filibuster as a means to “protect democracy.”
Admitting you’ll parrot Biden and Schumer’s partisan bullsh*t at the drop of a hat to nuke the filibuster doesn’t exactly seem like someone who’s too interested in taking a “center path” in Congress.
Far from it, Manchin and Sinema’s staunch opposition to nuking the filibuster made Hickenlooper look even worse.
Hickenlooper elected to side with Schumer and Biden in a doomed vote rather than taking the lonely “center path” with Manchin and Sinema.
So what did the Denver Post depict as evidence of Hickenlooper’s supposed moderation?
His participation in a working group that negotiated the infrastructure law.
We have a hard imagining the Post would apply a “centrist” label to someone like South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham who also negotiated the infrastructure bill, or for that matter Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell who also ultimately voted it.
The truth is the Senate’s only moderate Democrats in the Senate are Arizona U.S. Sen. Krysten Sinema and West Virginia U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin.
Everyone else, and especially the 15 Senate Dems like Hick and Bennet who voted with Biden 100% of the time, have absolutely no business telling anyone they are a centrist.