“As the project exists today, it needs to be changed,” he told West Virginia Metro News presenter Hoppy Kercheval in a radio interview when asked whether he supported or opposed President Joe’s $ 2.25 trillion proposal. Biden.
Manchin said he is against increasing the current corporate tax rate from 21% – which was instituted by the 2017 tax review under the Trump administration – to 28% as required in the bill and instead supports an intermediate rate 25%, which he called “fair”.
The West Virginia senator said he would use the 50-50 “advantage” he has in the Senate to demand changes before he voted to approve the bill, which was put forward, but must go through weeks or months of negotiations before being debated on the ground.
“If I don’t vote, I’m not going anywhere. So, we’re going to have some influence here. And I’m more than just me, Hoppy. There are six or seven other Democrats who think hard about it. We have to be competitive and we’re not going to play. caution in the wind, “he said, without revealing who the other Democrats are.
Manchin has signaled for weeks that he wants to include Republicans in negotiations on an infrastructure package and then pass a bipartisan bill that can get the 60 votes needed to lift an obstruction. He wants to avoid using a party budgeting process called reconciliation to approve it only with Democratic votes.
A decision by the Senate congressman on whether Senate rules allow them to use this process to approve the infrastructure project, as Covid’s $ 1.9 trillion aid project did earlier this year, could take place this week.
“We have to have our Republican friends working with us too,” said Manchin in the interview. “They simply cannot be against everything they think this will be the political stance that we will have for the 2022 elections.”