Fooled

In his memoir Hand to Mouth, the writer Paul Auster recounts a time in his late twenties and early thirties when—as a freelance translator and critic—he was struggling to make ends meet. At last, in his desperation to make a quick buck, he hit upon a particularly bizarre scheme to market a children's board game that involved playing virtual baseball with playing cards. He drew up his own version of the cards, then began marketing them around various toy conventions where the makers and distributors of such games could be found. 

After several discouraging attempts, he describes one seemingly promising encounter with a pair of toymakers from Illinois. Two brothers who ran the business together, they agreed to sit down with him and play through a round of the game he had invented. They seemed to enjoy it profoundly, and sent him many encouraging signals. They gave him their contact information, and told him to get in touch soon so they could make a decision as to whether or not to market the game. He sent them a letter after he left and waited. And waited. 

Finally—he tells us—he received a single, one-paragraph response from the brothers. Without any particular feeling or empathy, or any reference to the time they had spent enjoying the game together, it dismissed his idea and declined to work together further. The curt note was also rife with misspellings and basic grammatical errors. Auster felt embarrassed—not only on their behalf, but on his own. "I felt ashamed of myself for having misjudged them so thoroughly," he writes. "Put your faith in fools, and you end up fooling only yourself."

I experienced the same feeling this morning, as I read over the latest press interview with Senator Joe Manchin. Over the past six months, you see, I have paid inordinate attention to every cryptic utterance that dropped from the senator's lips. It's not that I want to have to trust him; it's that I (and so many other advocates) have no choice. He controls the decisive 50th Democratic vote in the Senate. If he agrees to go with the rest of the party caucus on something, that often means it will survive. If he opposes it, that's enough to kill it entirely. 

And it's not like Manchin gave us no reason whatsoever to hope. This summer, he made headlines by declaring that he does in fact support doing something related to immigration in the Build Back Better reconciliation bill. "I'm totally supportive of immigration," he said (a statement over which there was much rejoicing at the time, although it now sounds perilously vague and over-broad). He added that his support was contingent on the measure passing the Senate's "Byrd rule," but we expected this; and at the time we held out hope the parliamentarian would simply approve the measure. 

Innumerable immigration activists sent tweets extolling the senator's words as an encouraging sign; advocacy organizations issued press statements that likewise chalked this up as a win. We thought we had it in the bag now. If Manchin was on board, then the most likely obstacle we could see at the time had been removed. Of course, later on, the feeling started to sour. The parliamentarian objected to the measure, and Manchin said that he would not support circumventing her; he also at one point described immigration provisions as "too big" for the reconciliation bill. 

But the truly low blow didn't come until I checked the immigration policy news this morning. Manchin gave an interview to Fox News, it seems, in which he sang a very different tune. "For us to even be talking about immigration without border security is ludicrous," he said. "I've told them...the average person turns on the TV and sees what's going on in the border, and that basically scares the bejesus out of an awful lot of people [....] If [migrants] think they can come and get all the different benefits that people, the citizens of America [...] are entitled to, they're going to continue to come. So, no, I don't think so." 

Oh god, I thought. After all this time... he doesn't have the faintest idea what he's talking about. And this was the man in whom we had reposed our hopes. This was the senator we thought might come around and surprise us all by saving the day in the end. He is, in reality, a jabbering reactionary, spouting off right-wing soundbites that bear no relation to the proposals actually under consideration in the Build Back Better act. A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying everything, for people whose lives and futures depend on winning a path to citizenship. 

Paul Auster's words came back to me in that moment. "Put your faith in fools, and you end up fooling only yourself." We've been fooling ourselves royal, if we ever thought Manchin was going to stick up for immigrants. First it was, "I support it but it needs to pass the Byrd rule." Then it was fine but "too big." Now, he comes up with a third excuse that he probably had saved up and ready to go all along, in case those didn't work out. Ultimately, he just doesn't support the policy; he thinks immigrants are scammers trying to cash in on U.S. benefits; he is, in short, a dyed-in-the-wool right-winger who will do nothing for us. 

It doesn't mean Congress won't get anything done through reconciliation. It doesn't even wholly rule out citizenship because, should the Vice President keep the measure in the ultimate bill, Manchin would have to either rally 60 votes total to oppose it; or else he'd have to vote down the whole package (which he might well be willing to do; but then again, might not, due to the optics and politics of the thing). But it does mean we'll have to proceed without hoping for some unexpected late-stage save from the senator from West Virginia. If we keep putting faith in him, we will keep getting fooled.