As the Senators’ question time began last week, I offered a hopeful hypothetical, an imagined moment in which Senator Joe Manchin stood up for West Virginians and the party of FDR and JFK. I urged: “in the impeachment, it’s Joe Manchin’s time.” Sadly, we now know that even Sen. Joe Manchin no longer represents his state, whose citizens overwhelmingly support President Trump because he is actually for them.

Instead, Joe Manchin has called for a motion of censure, making a play to get four Republicans to join the Democrats against President Trump and his voters, a specious motion against normal presidential behavior of the sort these same senators condoned by inaction when it was President Obama. Sen. Manchin wrapped his surrender and service to the left in the false garment of “a moderate, centrist Democrat from West Virginia…” He showed no courage and spited the state that elected him more than once on promises of not being a tool of the bicoastal DNC governing elite.

If Sen. Lamar Alexander indulges Manchin’s gambit, it will be on behalf of big business and big agriculture in Tennessee, as they desperately fight to suppress American workers’ wages with an open spigot of cheap foreign labor and as their embrace of the radical secular social agenda is threatened by the first president since at least Reagan to actually deliver on the GOP social-conservative platform planks. Those planks are just supposed to keep the “Bible thumpers,” the rubes, in line at the ballot box, while substantial promise-keeping is only for defense contractor executives and big business.