Senator Joe Manchin recently announced that he would vote no on the Build Back Better Act (BBB), the landmark legislation that President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have been attempting to pass for the better part of 2021. Unless a last-ditch effort to get Manchin to reconsider is successful, his decision all but dooms what would have constituted the greatest single expansion of social programs benefiting ordinary working people since the 1960s while taking significant steps to address the climate crisis.

The deeply compromised act would not have established real social democracy in the United States, nor would it have been the dawn of a desperately needed Green New Deal. But it would have been a genuine and substantive piece of progressive legislation that helped tens of millions of working-class people, while increasing taxes on the rich. Such an agenda was too much to stomach for Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who announced on Fox News, “This is a no on this legislation.”

Of course, Manchin has always been one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress, representing a state that voted for Donald Trump by a more than two-to-one margin in 2020. He’s also the number one Senate recipient of fossil fuel campaign contributions, who has personally profited from lucrative investments in numerous coal companies that he founded in the 1980s.