ABC News wants you to believe a lone senator is solely responsible for “setting back” President Joe Biden’s multitrillion-dollar climate and social spending bill.

This is true so long as you ignore the other 51 lawmakers opposing the measure.

“A single senator is about to seriously set back an entire presidential agenda,” ABC reported Friday in a breaking news alert.

Its report, titled “Power of one: Manchin is singularly halting Biden's agenda,” reads: “In an extraordinary display of political power in the evenly split 50-50 Senate, a single senator is about to seriously set back an entire presidential agenda.”

Can you spot the problem with ABC’s framing? It’s right there in the text.

Sen. Joe Manchin is solely responsible for stalling Biden’s spending bill only if you ignore more than half of the Senate.

Is there a good reason we’re pretending most senators don’t exist? As if their votes apparently don’t matter and this is all on Manchin? This feels less like a hard news report and more like a set of regurgitated White House talking points designed to pressure a Democratic senator. Wouldn't we be shocked at that!

“Manchin's actions throw Democrats into turmoil at time when families are struggling against the prolonged COVID-19 crisis and Biden’s party needs to convince voters heading toward the 2022 election that their unified party control of Washington can keep its campaign promises,” ABC reports.

OK, it’s a little too obvious here, guys. We get it. The staff of ABC News really, really, really wants Manchin to be a good Democrat and push the bill over the top.

No, this isn’t news reporting. This isn’t even a decent characterization of the current power struggle on Capitol Hill. Remember: Manchin isn’t the only senator who’s withholding his vote. There are 50 or 51 other lawmakers in his corner.

For that matter, this isn’t even a decent characterization of how the Senate works.

Manchin is in Congress’s upper chamber to represent the interests of his state. He’s not there, as ABC suggests, to work for Biden — to shepherd the president’s domestic agenda through Congress. There’s a reason the legislative branch is separate from the executive branch. West Virginians happen to despise this president and his agenda. Is Manchin really behaving that much out of character?

Manchin is doing his job. Biden is doing his job. They are separate jobs, and at times, they are at odds. This is how the relationship between the executive and the legislative branches works. That Manchin and Biden have yet to find common ground on the spending bill isn’t some failure on the senator's part. If anything, it’s a failure on the president’s part.