She Has More GOP Fans In Congress Than Democratic Fans
I doubt many people have wasted more time writing about Kyrsten Sinema than I have. When I first met her she was still in the Arizona state legislature and we served on a non-profit board together. It didn’t take me long to figure out she was completely deranged and one of the most self-serving opportunists I had ever met. I steered clear. Very much like Trump, she believes in nothing but herself, nor has she ever… at least in the time since I met her. In the U.S. House, she became chair of the Blue Dogs and ran up the single worst record of any Democrat in Congress. That immediately attracted the attention of Chuck Schumer, the. Head of the DSCC, who cleared the field so she could run for the Senate. (Everything she’s done since then should be blamed on him.)
The last legitimate poll before she announced her retirement was done by Emerson. Like every legitimate poll, they found her struggling in third place, below Ruben Gallego (D) and Kari Lake (MAGA). She has an immense trove of opposition research on Gallego, who she hates intensely. I wonder if she’ll slip it to Lake. I wouldn't put it past her.
Yesterday, New York Magazine published a brief Good Riddance to the plutocratic shill piece by Jonathan Chait, noting that she announced her retirement “with a self-serving message about how she is too good for this fallen world— too committed to bipartisanship and progress when people just want anger and division. As an explanation for why Sinema is giving up politics, this is obviously a total crock. Americans do appreciate bipartisan compromise. Sinema is not the only member of Congress who has been involved in legislation with both parties. But she is the only Democrat who incinerated her political career because the causes she chose to fight for are substantively awful and deeply unpopular.”
Sinema rankled Democrats by mounting a deeply confused and ahistorical defense of the filibuster, falsely claiming that it was designed by the Founders (who, in fact, limited the supermajority requirement to specific matters and opposed it for general legislation) and that it protects social spending for the poor (which, in fact, can be cut by a majority under current rules). This position did anger liberals, but it’s not the kind of issue that engages the general public.
The stance that alienated Sinema from voters was her idiosyncratic attitude during negotiations over the Biden administration’s domestic-policy agenda. Sinema opposed letting the government negotiate the cost of Medicare prescription drugs, ultimately conceding to allow a dramatically smaller version of the reform Biden wanted. Even more amazing, she took a hard line against tax increases on the wealthy, even opposing limits on the notorious carried-interest tax loophole.
Sinema’s farewell message presents these stances as nonpartisan and anti-inflationary. “By standing up to short-sighted partisan ideas,” she said, “I protected our country’s economic growth and competitiveness and kept taxes low during a time of rampant inflation.”
This is the opposite of the truth. Both Biden and Trump promised during their campaigns to enable Medicare to negotiate drug prices and to eliminate the carried-interest loophole. She was blocking ideas of bipartisan consensus, not enabling them.
Even more bizarre is her claim that this stance somehow responded to “rampant inflation.” The textbook legislative response to high inflation is to impose tight fiscal policy that raises taxes and cuts spending. During the fiscal negotiations, that was the posture Senator Joe Manchin took. Sinema’s position was the opposite: She supported most of the spending increases favored by liberals but opposed all the ways they wanted to pay for them. Sinema had the single most inflationary impact on Biden’s agenda of any senator.
To the extent Biden managed to craft a bill that could be sold as an anti-inflationary measure— which it was, slightly— it was despite Sinema, not because of her.
The obvious reason she adopted these deeply unpopular positions on prescription-drug pricing and taxing the wealthy is almost certainly that she came to believe them. She seemed to grow close to the ultrawealthy and was an easy mark for even their most transparently unsound arguments.
There is plenty of room in the Democratic Party for a bipartisan dealmaker, and Sinema’s sob story should not deter anybody from pursuing that profile. There’s no room for a transparent shill for the self-serving rich.
The most generous interpretation of Sinema’s career arc is that she came to deeply and earnestly subscribe to the worldview of the wealthy people who surrounded her, to the point where she was willing to incinerate a promising political career to defend their interests. A less generous interpretation is that she was played for a sucker. In either case, the cause of bipartisanship will be no worse, and the Senate will be better off, without her.
Bernie was on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert Tuesday night. When Colbert announced she would not be seeking reelection, the audience broke out into cheers causing Bernie to start laughing. Asked how much he would miss her, Bernie replied “Not at all,” causing even more applause and cheers. Watch— he explained why:
Sinema is the picture of senatorial corruption. She’s already grown very wealthy selling herself to rich Republicans. Bryan Metzger speculated that was just the beginning. Atone point she told Mitt Romney she wasn’t worried about losing reelection. “I don't care. I can go on any board I want to. I can be a college president. I can do anything. I saved the Senate filibuster by myself. I saved the Senate by myself. That's good enough for me.” There’s been a great deal of speculation that she’ll be headed to K Street for a lucrative lobbying gig, and people are wagering on which corporate boards she’ll wind up on.
Let me give you just one example of Sinema-grade corruption. In return for blocking free community college and student debt relief— and for voting with Republicans to raise the cap on student loan debt interest rates— she took tens of thousands of dollars in campaign support from the predatory student loan industry and was the fifth biggest recipient of legalistic bribes from for-profit colleges. Should she be locked up in prison for this kind of behavior? Well of course… along with other elected officials who get away with the same disgraceful shit.
