It is hard to say that one politician’s vote changed the course of history. 
Usually, people point to one elected person’s ability to lead the country through a crisis as the reason why the course of history was changed. Lincoln during the American Civil War and Winston Churchill during the entirety of World War II are legitimate examples of when true leaders “saved” the American republic or Western civilization as we know it.
But Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia sure deserves at least an honorable mention in the Profiles in Courage Hall of Fame for his opposition to the outrageously expensive Build Back Better signature program of President Joe Biden and his left-wing, socialist, progressive Democratic Party.
President Biden’s handlers want to make him out to be the reincarnation of FDR or LBJ. He is not. He is exactly the president socialist Eugene Debs or Bernie Sanders would have been had they been elected president.
In that regard, Sen. Manchin is the Grinch who saved Christmas and maybe the American democratic republic — for now.
First, some perspective is needed. Manchin opposed the $5 trillion budget-busting BBB bill that would have most assuredly added trillions to the national debt and raised the tax burden on millions of taxpayers.
The national debt today is $29 trillion. The debt limit was raised by the Democratic majority in Congress to $31.4 trillion, with $6.1 trillion of this debt being intragovernmental between Social Security and other programs. All of that has to be paid at some point in cash via higher taxes or massive cuts to Social Security benefits paid out to Boomers in the very near future.
The entire U.S. GDP is $23 trillion in the aggregate. You can do the comparative math.
It is hard to say Manchin “saved the American republic” permanently since we don’t know if anyone else in Congress or the White House has the guts and brains to arrest the inexorable rise in federal debt.
Maybe future historians will say Sen. Manchin merely “hit the pause button” on the road to American fiscal demise.
What can really save the American democratic republic is if huge majorities of voters come to their senses and vote for elected representatives at every level of government who understand that, while they might be celebrated by the left for “looking out for the poor” or “advocating for children,” each time they do so it is with “Other People’s Money” (OPM), not their own.
Very few politicians have ever started a company or worked in a high-level corporate position to understand what it takes to run a successful business. When I worked for former Congressman Alex McMillan, he was one of only three congressional representatives who had ever been CEO or CFO of a major corporation.
To most liberal representatives, OPM is make-believe money, like Monopoly money they can take out of the box whenever they want with no serious downside attached. They have no concept of real-world economics, finance or business — and it shows.
In an odd twist, the radical progressive socialist left is doing exactly what they can do to help “save the American republic” — show how dangerous and destructive their policies really are in practice. The more their true stripes are revealed in public, the more independents and unaffiliated voters have realized they helped elect the most liberal and socialist president and Congress in 2020 in American history.
In 2022, these same independents and unaffiliateds will get the chance to rectify their major mistake when they bought into the lie that Joe Biden was a “moderate” and would govern from the center. Instead, they got a confused older gentleman who was not named Bernie Sanders but governed like him anyway.
America may have dodged a major bullet because of Sen. Joe Manchin’s bravery. Everyone in Congress needs to follow his lead and just say “no” to more spending from now on. For about a decade to be exact.
