A large group of protesters swarmed Senator Joe Manchin’s car Thursday morning and blocked his car in a parking garage in an effort to confront him over the Democrat’s social spending bill.
The crowd followed Manchin from his houseboat on the Potomac River in Washington DC to a parking garage where he keeps his car. They chanted “We want to live!” and “Fight for us!” as they walked.
Once he got into his Maserati and attempted to leave the parking garage, the protesters surrounded his car. He honked his horn at them and many accused him of trying to run them over.
Videos of the incident spread all over social media, with protesters boasting about blockading his car. The group continued to yell at him over the horn and one woman in a video said “this is Joe Manchin’s car slowly pressing into our peaceful protesters”.
The protesters continued chanting “We want to live! We want to live!” and “F*** Joe Manchin” and eventually security guards cleared a path for the senator to drive away.
Manchin and his colleague, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have repeatedly been targets of harassment due to their objection of the Biden administration’s $1.75 trillion Build Back Better Act.
Manchin had said “I will not support a bill that is this consequential without thoroughly understanding the impact it will have on our national debt, our economy and the American people”.
Maggie Howell, a staffer for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, tweeted “Weird that blocking someone from driving to work, screaming at them, and then pretending he was running you over didn’t make him empathize with you!”
In September, activists used kayaks to get to Manchin’s houseboat and harass him over the legislation. Around the same time, Sinema was followed into a bathroom at Arizona State University, where she teaches, while protesters demanded she support a pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens.