The filibuster doesn’t seem all that sacred now, does it?
For more than a week, Kyrsten Sinema has been making noise about a big vacation she had planned for the weekslong Senate recess. Amped for some time at a luxurious vineyard, she let it be known via Politico that she’d told Chuck Schumer that she wouldn’t be sticking around for any extra votes once her precious bipartisan infrastructure deal and reconciliation both passed in the upper chamber. It was a not-so-subtle way to signal that she had no interest in helping out with voting rights.
She continued to thumb her nose at progressives as the week went on, defending the filibuster on The View with nakedly cynical false logic (more on that below) and reiterating that she objected to the size of the budget reconciliation package without really explaining why. Then, to top it all off, she posted on Instagram about desperately needing a vacation (and then offered up a few videos of her feet, which I guess wins her points with one very particular constituency).
Trolling the libs for weeks and then skipping out of DC for a relaxing vacation would have marked the apex of her eight-month reign of terror over the Democratic Party… had the very tool she has used to torment her constituents just blew up in her face.
Republican Sen. Bill Haggerty of Tennessee really ticked her off earlier this week when he refused to allow unanimous consent on the bipartisan infrastructure bill. He wanted to hold votes on a whole bunch of amendments, slowing down the works and not allowing the Senate to get its policy passed.
You might say he was filibustering. This video is glorious:
As you see in the video above, Sinema was unbelievably angry that Haggerty would muck up the works and stop her precious bill from passing. For someone who smugly claims bipartisanship is the ultimate end goal, her temperamental outburst at a Republican for simply using the rules she so passionately defends was a real tell.
Of course, Sinema’s defense of the filibuster is simply a power play, not any actual heartfelt belief. In the video below, Sinema cloaks her cynicism in a slow and empathetic voice that seduces people into thinking that she’s the lone rational adult in a political system gone crazy. In reality, she’s absolutely full of shit. Her defenses of the filibuster are the equivalent of a firefighter standing in front of a burning block of buildings and refusing to tap into a hydrant’s water because something might catch fire one day.
The first excuse she cites here is her desire to protect women’s health rights, which entirely ignores the many extreme restrictions put on abortion rights by GOP-controlled states (see: Missouri right now) and the Supreme Court’s impending repeal of Roe v Wade.
Her second justification, that Republicans might try to pass voter suppression laws if they get back control of the Senate, is even more laughable. People have been protesting new state GOP voter suppression laws in DC since February, state legislatures continue to pursue garbage election “audits,” and Republicans absolutely will take back the US Senate should Democrats not pass new laws to protect voting rights.
Sinema knows all this; she just doesn’t care. Texas Democrats haven’t been able to score a meeting with her for their nearly monthlong stay in DC, her home state Arizona Democratic Party members can’t get more than a few minutes of a perfunctory Zoom call with her, and civil rights leaders just got arrested at her office last week. The reality is that Sinema gets a kick out of saying idiotic and illogical things to dash the hopes of the people who so desperately need her to cooperate. Her ongoing recalcitrance pisses off the libs, allows her to flex her power, and make donors happy.
Progressives and mainstream Democrats are moving toward supporting a major primary challenge against Sinema, and sooner rather than later. Arizona has gone blue in large part due to the hard work of Latino organizations such as LUCHA, which were formed in the wake of the passage of SB 1070, aka the racist “Show Me Your Papers” bill that was enacted in 2010. They put her in office in 2018 and now she refuses to even meet with them. The organization calls what Sinema is doing “a slap in the face” after all the work they’ve done to further her political career. Now, they’re looking at supporting a primary challenger.
Sinema still has time to fix this, and more importantly, save American democracy. If she continues down this path, she will lose her re-election bid in 2024. The only real question will be whether her loss comes via progressive primary challenger, a more popular Republican general election challenger, or GOP voter suppression.
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