Joe Biden has never been known for subtlety. Fox News reports:
President Biden has picked the wife of an extremely influential U.S. senator for a federal commission post, the White House announced Friday.
Biden nominated Gayle Conelly Manchin to co-chair the Appalachian Regional Commission, an economic development partnership with 13 states designed to boost investment in the Appalachian Region.
Manchin is an educator, past president of West Virginia’s State Board of Education and the former first lady of West Virginia.
She’s been married for 53 years to Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a critical vote in the Senate for Biden if he wants to get any of his major legislative priorities passed.
Those legislative priorities – passing HR 1 to guarantee Republicans will never win another presidency or congressional majority by mandating nationwide cheating-enabling mail-in voting with no ID requirements and much more – depend on ending the filibuster. And Manchin’s vote is required to do that.
If confirmed by the Senate (almost certain, given a party line vote – though it wouldn’t surprise me to see Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and maybe other GOP solons duped by the notion of “comity” voting to confirm), Mrs. Manchin would have major role in an agency with a $165 million budget whose “mission is to innovate, partner, and invest to build community capacity and strengthen economic growth in Appalachia.”
The word “invest” is the key one here. That means money. Money handed out to people, either directly or through loan guarantees (think: Solyndra) or some other mechanism.
Just this month, for instance:
[T]he Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) announced five grant awards for the Advanced Welding Workforce Initiative (AWWI), a partnership to invest $1 million in education and training for advanced technical workers in Appalachia.
The Manchin family is no stranger to making money off of government favors. as Jayne O’Donnell reported in USA Today in 2016:
After Gayle Manchin took over the National Association of State Boards of Education in 2012, she spearheaded an unprecedented effort that encouraged states to require schools to purchase medical devices that fight life-threatening allergic reactions.
The association’s move helped pave the way for Mylan Specialty, maker of EpiPens, to develop a near monopoly in school nurses’ offices. Eleven states drafted laws requiring epinephrine auto-injectors. Nearly every other state recommended schools stock them after what the White House called the “EpiPen Law” in 2013 gave funding preference to those that did.
The CEO of Mylan then, and now, was Heather Bresch. Gayle Manchin is Heather Bresch’s mother.
Mylan is the subject of congressional investigations related to huge price hikes the company announced last month. It also faces an antitrust probe by the New York attorney general stemming from its EpiPen sales contracts with schools.
Don’t hold your breath for the mainstream media to call out this barely disguised bribery scheme. They are on board with the “legislative agenda” that will transform America into a very different country. The door is about to open for the "fundamental transformation" Barack Obama promised.