Democrats will move forward with President Donald Trump, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin said Friday, and he hopes that a spirit of cooperation will prevail when it comes to the future.
"I think we're going to move forward," the moderate Democrat told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program. "There's 10 or 12 of us on the Senate side, moderates, they're looking for a pathway to work."
But for that to happen, there will have to be cooperation from both sides, said Manchin, as House Speaker Paul Ryan "can't give us [something] so toxic we can't get anything moving. On the other hand, President-elect Trump and his administration has to work with him . . . I'll be an honest broker. If it works, it works; if it doesn't, it doesn't."
Manchin said he was asked this week about Democrats who have vowed to "stonewall everything," and his opinion is that "two wrongs don't make a right."
"As a Democrat, we're upset about what happened the last six, eight years, and it didn't work well," Manchin said. "The country didn't move forward and we didn't have progressive legislation done. But to do the same thing is wrong, just wrong. So I said, 'you know, that's what we're sent here to do. You weren't sent here to represent yourself. You were sent here to represent the people.'"
Meanwhile, Manchin said he is concerned about one of Trump's nominees, Betsy DeVos as secretary of education, because of her stance on charter schools.
"I came from a rural state and our funding mechanism for rural states is much different than what the large urban areas are," Manchin said. "If Betsy is looking at basically strictly going privatizing and it works and charter schools works, it might work in an urban metropolitan area.
"When you start doing that, you're going to decimate, truly destroy the rural school systems we have and I'm just not going in that direction. I think it's wrong . . . I have a bunch of small towns, beautiful people in small towns, and they need their public school system."
Manchin said he also does not agree with repealing Obamacare without having a replacement plan in place.
"I've spoken to the president-elect about this and I said, 'listen, this thing came in 2009. I wasn't there," Manchin said.
Further, the Affordable Care Act was passed through the votes of 60 Democrats and "not one Republican. That's not bipartisan."
The measure didn't only split the country, but Manchin said he was governor of West Virginia at the time, and it split his state.
"You're going to now throw it out with 51 Republicans, not one Democrat," Manchin said. "There's no way I'm going to throw it out and say we're going to repair it later. Two years from now we won't do anything, nothing changes, that gets you past the 2018 election."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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