For a decade, Joe Manchin and Shelley Moore Capito have worked together in the Senate, across party lines and under three different presidents to get things done for West Virginia.
That all comes to an end in January. Manchin is leaving after 14 years in the chamber.
At a recent event in Charleston honoring Manchin’s long career in public service, Capito said she has some big shoes to fill.
“And it’s really true that I have very large shoes to fill, because I will be the senior senator” Capito said. “I keep reminding him of this. I will be the senior senator when he leaves. But you know, if I don’t remember that I have big shoes to fill, he reminds me every single day how much I’m going to miss him.”
Capito went through a long list of the things they did together. They got a national park designation for the New River Gorge, and visits to the park have increased.
“I was kind of reflecting back on some of the energy, things that we’ve done together, or some of the things that I think will live on beyond us, but our partnership actually brought about, and certainly the New River Gorge Park and Preserve is one of those which we see is really a five star destination for so many people,” she said.
They put pressure on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to issue a permit for the Nucor steel plant in Mason County. The mating habits of mussels in the Ohio River was the holdup, Capito said.
They helped write the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, one of the biggest infrastructure packages in years. They pushed for the completion of the $8 billion Mountain Valley Pipeline, and they secured federal funding for an Appalachian Regional Hydrogen Hub.
Earlier on, they helped save the health care and pension benefits for thousands of retired UMWA coal miners.
“We have worked, I think, incredibly well as partners, and I’m very appreciative of the partnership that we have,” Capito said. “It’s been a great 10 years.”
That’s a decade of seniority Capito has built in the Senate. She’s become part of the Senate’s Republican leadership and she’s poised to become a committee chairman on Environment and Public Works.
West Virginia will keep her voice on the important Appropriations and Commerce committees.
“Well, it’s going to be a large weight that she’s going to carry for the state,” he said. “She’s now our standard bearer in the U.S. Senate.”
That’s Sam Workman, director of the Institute for Policy Research and Public Affairs at West Virginia University.
At the Charleston event, Manchin said Capito was up to the task.
“She can take it. She’s tough. I’ve watched her up there,” Manchin said. “She’s well respected, well liked.”
Workman says Manchin’s departure marks not only the loss of a senior senator but also the end of a partnership that used to be more common in the chamber but has become rare.
“This is more than about us losing seniority in the Senate,” he said. “It’s really the dissolution of a Senate middle who were comfortable being in rooms like you were in the other evening and sort of cutting deals and making bridges across the aisle, both sides, to really sort of engage in a brand of politics that’s very pragmatic and very place based and very issue centered. And there’s not a lot of room for that in the U.S. Senate these days.”
Manchin says their colleagues have noticed.
“They’ll see us together and talking or doing or working on something, they say, ‘I just can’t believe how good you two get along.’ And they said, ‘My senator’s in my same party, from my own state, we don’t get along.’ And there’s not that many senators basically from states right now,” Manchin said. “States are either red or blue. You either have two Democrats or two Republicans. You very seldom have one of each, just a few states.”
Manchin and Capito have a friendship that predates their time in the Senate. Both came from prominent families. Manchin’s uncle, A. James Manchin, held statewide office in the 1970s and ’80s. Capito’s father, Arch Moore, was governor for three terms in the 1970s and ’80s.
Both served in the state legislature. Capito was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, while Manchin was elected Secretary of State and governor.
Both took over from legendary and long-serving senators: Manchin for Robert Byrd and Capito for Jay Rockefeller.
Workman says the Byrd-Rockefeller era of the Senate was a very different one. They overlapped from Rockefeller’s election in 1984 to Byrd’s death in office in 2010 – more than 25 years.
“They could count on log rolls,” Workman said. “They could count on senators generally being pragmatic, respecting decorum, and not, in a way, cutting their nose off to spite their face. But very much, that’s the world we’re in today.
Capito says she and Manchin have felt comfortable enough standing in for one another.
“So we are there for one another in many, many instances,” she said. “If I can’t go, he offers to go and speak and fly the flag for both of us. I certainly will miss that and certainly appreciate it.”
Manchin, a longtime Democrat who registered as an independent earlier this year, says the work he’s done with Capito transcends party.
“We’ll work together on something, and we’ve always done that,” he said. “It’s not been Democrat, Republican, it’s been about West Virginia and the country, and that’s what it should be.”
