Joe Manchin calls Capitol Hill a 'hostile working environment'
Can't we all just get along? At the very least, Joe Manchin would prefer it that way.
During a Thursday morning appearance on CNN's New Day, the Democratic senator from West Virginia shared his hopes for bipartisanship on Capitol Hill, telling host John Berman that in its current partisan form, Congress is actually quite the "hostile working environment."
"You want to know what's wrong with the place? I go to work in a hostile working environment every day," Manchin said. "If you're a Democrat and a Republican is up for election, you're supposed to be against that person. If Donald Duck's running against that person, you're supposed to give money from your PAC to help the other person beat the person that you've been working with." Manchin says if he had it his way, he would change ethics laws so that senators couldn't campaign against one another.
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"You have an obligation and a responsibility to get something done," said Manchin to Berman. "And you can't get something done if you're the enemy on the other side every time there's an election."
Especially in "today's divided country and divided government that we have," you "have to work at" bipartisanship just "a little bit harder," Manchin had added earlier.
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Brigid Kennedy worked at The Week from 2021 to 2023 as a staff writer, junior editor and then story editor, with an interest in U.S. politics, the economy and the music industry.
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