Talking to a folksy neoliberal brick wall

What being a progressive senator is like these days:

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand long has called on Congress to provide paid family and medical leave to the millions of Americans who don’t have it. So when she found out last week the plan had been dropped from her party’s landmark spending bill, she began an eleventh-hour campaign to try to resurrect it.

The New York Democrat targeted the chief objector to the program, Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.). She hit the phones Friday and fired off a flurry of texts to her moderate-leaning colleague that continued into the weekend, saying she would be even willing to “meet him in D.C. or anywhere in the country” to make the case for the benefits, she said in an interview.

Yet Manchin refused to relent, Gillibrand said, resisting her latest entreaties much as he had the many alternatives that Democrats had presented to him in recent weeks.

[…]

A day earlier, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) hammered Manchin indirectly, stressing that Democrats are “not going to let one man tell all the women in this country that they can’t have paid leave.” And a wide array of lawmakers, including Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), [!–ed] have placed calls to Manchin directly about the issue, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

Of course, in any remotely functional constitutional system Manchin would be a harmless eccentric would who would be reduced to fighting for his share of the pork rather than the de facto co-president, but you legislate with the constitutional anachronisms you have rather than the democratic institutions ones you wish you had.