Jules Witcover, syndicated columnist

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden won high marks for his initial foreign trip in office, demonstrating familiarity with issues and leaders in Europe. But his return home confronted him with difficult domestic division compromising his ability to have his way on a range of critical matters.

His problem centers on the political reality of his current razor-thin majority in Congress and his need to maintain it in the 2022 midterm elections. Biden clings to a 50-50 party split in the Senate, with Vice President Kamal breaking tie votes as president of the Senate.

As a result, a single independent-minded Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, has held in his hands the option to retain or to deny that party majority and hence Biden’s narrow edge, and with it the fate of much of his legislative agenda in his first year in the Oval Office.

Of immediate concern was whether the new president could muster enough votes in the Senate to defeat Republican efforts to limit voting rights in the various states that Biden and his Democratic Party allege constitute a serious threat to the nation’s democratic process. That effort, in the form of the For the People Act, was defeated in the Senate Tuesday.

This follows similar obstruction in May in which Senate Republicans blocked legislation that would create an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, which was aided and abetted by former president Donald Trump. Trump’s involvement led to a second House impeachment, but it fell short of the required two-thirds vote and he was acquitted.

Manchin is a 73-year-old former governor and veteran of 11 years in the Senate of no particular distinction from a small state. He has managed to position himself as a go-to legislator, obliging Biden to court him if he hopes to maintain that Senate majority through the midterm elections.

The West Virginian has presented himself as a colleague of Biden in the advocacy of bipartisanship but has advocated a less costly compromise on infrastructure repair than that proposed by the president.The optics of the president being obliged to deal directly with Manchin are not likely to enhance Biden’s efforts to solidify his own stature, should it drag on in the days and weeks ahead.

Imperiled now is Biden’s ambitious agenda that includes proposals on climate change, police reform and expansion of Obamacare, as well as reasserting his defense of other democracies threatened by the growth of autocratic states and leaders abroad.

On one early stop in the United Kingdom, Biden argued: “How we act, and whether we pull together as democracies, is going to determine how our grandkids look back 15 years from now and say, ‘Did they step up? Are democracies as relevant and a powerful as they have been?’ “

In the new president’s determination to maintain the traditional American role of leadership in the Western Alliance, he was appropriately forceful in saying “America is back” after of the chaos of the Trump interim. Now he is back home, needing to cope with a highly partisan environment requiring his best skills at reaching across the aisle.

Editor’s note: Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@comcast.net.