President Joe Biden is determined to pursue his "ideological agenda" rather than confront the "clear and present danger that debts and deficits pose to our nation," Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., wrote Wednesday in a scathing opinion piece for the The Wall Street Journal.
Manchin, who provided the crucial vote for Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, in the piece also categorized the bill as a "betrayal" and accused the Biden administration of abusing the legislation to increase spending levels unilaterally.
"While all parties have a responsibility to negotiate in good faith, recent actions make clear to me that the Biden administration is determined to pursue an ideological agenda rather than confront the clear and present danger that debts and deficits pose to our nation," Manchin wrote. "Instead of implementing the law as intended, unelected ideologues, bureaucrats and appointees seem determined to violate and subvert the law to advance a partisan agenda that ignores both energy and fiscal security."
Biden administration officials, he argued, are ignoring the law's intent to support and expand fossil energy and are redefining "domestic energy" to increase clean-energy spending to potentially deficit-breaking levels.
"The administration is attempting at every turn to implement the bill it wanted, not the bill Congress actually passed," he wrote. "Ignoring the debt and deficit implications of these actions as the time nears to raise the debt ceiling isn't only wrong, it's policy and political malpractice."
Biden, he said, is the only person who can "rein in this extremism."
Manchin said the president should sit down with "fiscally minded" lawmakers from both parties to negotiate "common-sense reforms" to out-of-control fiscal policy.
Additionally, Biden should instruct his administration "to implement the Inflation Reduction Act as written and stop redefining its credits and other subsidies."
Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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