The Calculator: Kyrsten Sinema figures she’s found the sweet spot in Arizona politics. But many Democrats are bitter, and believe she’s not on their--or America’s--side.
Back from the flu, The Resistant Grandmother has a thing or three to say about Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema--the filibuster's bestie.
Her story about being so poor her family had to live for three years in an abandoned gas station with no electricity and running water could not help but affect many Arizona voters. And she became the first Democrat elected from Arizona to the U.S. Senate since Dennis Deconcini in 1977. The 2019 Senate victory scored by 43-year-old Arizona Congresswoman’s from Arizona’s 9th district helped set the stage for Democrats’ taking back the Senate majority two years later with the dramatic victory of Georgia’s two new Democratic Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in their Jan. 4, 2021 runoff elections--two days before Trump’s Capitol riot. Finally, as conventional wisdom had it, Democrats now had the muscle to pass needed legislation following the debilitating year-and-a-half of the Covid pandemic and the equally toxic four-year presidency of Donald Trump.
The juggernaut from within
But no.
Sinema and her Senate hero Joe Manchin would form a two-person juggernaut that threatened to deep-six key aspects of newly elected President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda and dampen if not dash Democrats’ hopes of building a strong record to bring into the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election. The slim 50-50 Democratic “majority,” as Vice President Kamala Harris can be called upon to break a tie vote, also took on even greater importance when, in red state after red state, Republicans passed laws that would not only greatly restrict minority access to voting, but more saliently, change laws to give GOP legislatures the right to call elections, thus essentially ceding election outcomes to partisan political hacks.
Whereas not playing ball with your own party was not necessarily unexpected from Manchin, whose home state of West Virginia voted for Trump by a 39 point margin, it was surprising that Sinema formed part of the duo. Biden won Arizona by almost 11,000 votes and the state has seen a growth in center-left Democratic politics leading to the election of two Democratic U.S. senators within the last two years.
Sinema’s playing hard to get with Democrats—her Democrats—would be surprising except to anyone following Sinema’s rise in Arizona politics and her not unfamiliar flirtation with Republicans over Democrats.
Sinema’s political career emerges as a picture of an increasingly higher and higher curve to the right. It began with her running in 2002 for a seat in the Arizona Legislature as a Green Party candidate; she came in last in a five-person race. Two years later she won as a Democrat, then ran for the Arizona Senate in 2010. Her next run was for a seat in the U.S. Congress representing Arizona’s recently created 9th district. She would stay in that job until running for her current U.S. Senate seat in 2018. Each step on the political ladder would, philosophically, take her farther and farther away from her Green Party roots.
Today, Sinema is considered a center-right or conservative Democrat, not by what she says (still claiming she works for the disadvantaged), but by her record. In a 2020 ideological ranking by GovTrack.us, a non-partisan organization that monitors government data and statistics, the Arizona Senator ranked 47th on the group’s “tends-conservative” scale based on lawmakers’ 2019 records. In that she ranks two points higher in conservative rankings than Senate Minority Leader Republican Mitch McConnell whose “tends conservative” score is not as high as Sinema’s,
coming in at 49.
In a way, who can blame Sinema, as Arizona, which appears to be becoming more purple, but also right now seems far from joining its neighboring state New Mexico from becoming reliably blue. So she must win middle-of-the-road voters.
But Sinema’s ascendency to the Senate marked not just one politician’s skillful appeal to a wide array of voters--the soft Democrats, soft Republicans and Independents--who balance each other out in Arizona elections. It also signaled her ability to turn out voters from the state’s growing Progressive contingent who form a loyal base to any Democrat running state-wide.
According to Alexandra Gomez the co-executive director of the Progressive “Living for Change Arizona”:
“While you can’t have a resounding victory with the vote of Black,
Indigenous people of color, and Latinex community, you can’t win an election on a statewide level without the Black, Indigenous people of color, and Latinex community.”
Although Arizona’s Progressive Democrats form a core of Sinema’s Democratic faithful, to their dismay she’s not exactly tending to their needs in the careful, consistent way politicians usually treat their base voters. To her critics--now a growing legion--Sinema refuses to fulfill her obligation to vote in Democrats’ interests or tow the party line in all the big, principled issues of Democratic politics. These include measures for helping the middle-to-lower classes overcome the years of legislative leg-up advantages given to the wealthiest Americans, causing the middle to lower-middle voters to fall farther and farther behind in the race to make ends meet.
Sinema, unlike the two new Senators from Georgia who also must straddle the need to appeal both to a wider array of voters and their Progressive base, is not a reliable vote on these issues. According to a Jan. 13 report in the political pundit-respected FiveThirtyEight polling site, Sinema voted for Trump legislation 50 percent of the time during his tenure. By contrast, for example, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) had a 28.7 percent Trump voting average.
Sinema’s off the (Democratic) reservation voting record
In 2018 Sinema bucked her Party and not only voted for but co-managed the passage of the monstrous Crapo (long a) banking bill that overturned much of Democrats’ signature Dodd-Frank legislation passed in 2010 as a response to Wall Street excesses, and loosened restrictions against discrimination against minorities and consumers.
The long list of other conservative legislation she backed includes being only one of four Democrats to vote to give banks, businesses, and credit unions an advisory role on regulations at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), urging the CFPB to delay enforcement of a rule to make loan terms and purchase agreements more comprehensible until the busiest home-buying time of year had passed, and repeatedly introduced a bill that would allow predatory lenders to slap their usually lower-income buyers with bigger fees and penalties, and allow them to charge higher than already extortionist-level interest fees. She’s also backed repealing the current estate tax rate which would benefit the country’s .2 percent of wealthiest estates.
As a first term Congresswoman in 2012, Sinema’s hard tack to the right began almost immediately. She signed on to a letter calling for bi-partisan proposals “to secure the nation’s fiscal (my ital) health including “reforming” Social Security and Medicare, cutting corporate tax rates and regulations, and reducing government spending.
In her first year in Congress, Sinema won a coveted seat on the House Financial Services Committee, an assignment “known as a quick ticket to the largesse from the industry it oversees,” according to Branko Marcetic in a March 24, 2021 article in Jacobin magazine. With the appointment, the woman who had once spent three years living in an abandoned gas station said she would use her committee role to “work to rebuild Arizona’s middle class...This is what prompted me to run for office, to be the voice of the forgotten middle and working class.”
But “Sinema largely spent the next five years on the Committee carrying water for the financial services industry, whose Arizona presence happened to be concentrated in Sinema’s newly won district” (Marcetic). One of Sinema’s earliest actions was to approve a partial rollback of one of the Democrats’ signature pieces of legislation following the 2008 economic crisis, the Dodd-Frank bill. The new legislation would allow financial services companies to trade certain derivatives and still get a taxpayer bailout if their trading went south. Clearly, Sinema’s allegiances to focus on the downtrodden would be replaced by the significance of her legislative efforts for the well-heeled.
Another Medicare-related issue--this time one that’s come up in Sinema’s Senate career--is particularly baffling to Sinema’s voters: her opposition to allowing Medicare to negotiate (down) drug prices, which would save much money for seniors in her state and for the federal government, billions. More than 8 in 10 Americans support the measure.
As for Sinema’s professed desire to help the disadvantaged, that apparently does not apply to immigrant workers or would-be Latinx American citizens. Sinema has repeatedly refused to meet with a pro-immigration group, Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA), with which newly elected Senator from Arizona Mark Kelly has a “warm relationship,” according to a LUCHA spokesman.
Let Them Eat Cake
Another example of Sinema’s betrayal of lower-class citizens involves her rejection early this year of the proposal to hike the federal minimum wage up to $15.00. The Biden Covid package included the measure both because the minimum wage has not been increased since 2009 and to incentivize workers still staying home from the pandemic because of child-rearing responsibilities and the babysitting fees returning to work would entail.
Showing up for the Senate vote carrying a chocolate cake and wearing knee-high leather boots and an orange wig, Sinema strode onto the Senate floor and patted Mitch McConnell on the back. When her name was called, Sinema gave a dramatic thumbs down to the measure--a gesture reminiscent of Arizona Senator John McCain’s vote on the Republican bill that would have gotten rid of the Affordable Care Act (Obama Care)--and then, oddly, curtsied.
According to veteran Washington Post political writer Aaron Blake, “Sinema’s demonstrative thumbs down...was viewed by some on the left as a thumb in the eye--particularly as she was voting against something her party’s base is firmly behind and that many of the party’s most passionate activists see as being vital to America’s working class.”
Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) who heads the House Progressive caucus Tweeted: “No one should ever be this happy to vote against uplifting people out of poverty.”
To be fair, Sinema claimed she favored an increase, but that the issue should be removed from the Covid relief bill as it was not exactly related to the problems of the virus. Strange, in that it was targeted to help lower class voters go back to work. In that, her reason seemed to fit along the lines of other odd excuses Sinema has given on issues. Sinema claimed the bill should be separated from Biden’s Covid package as it needed a separate discussion and introduction process...ever the stickler when it comes to helping-people laws.
But critics saw Sinema’s rationale as another example of a either a refusal or inability to look at larger issues and address them as quickly as possible--a typical flaw in Sinema’s law-making judgment.
Fealty to the filibuster, not freedom
Because of two Democratic Senators, Sinema and Manchin, the filibuster thwarts Democrats’ ability to protect free and fair elections, allowing this critical moment in time to vanish, ushering in what many consider the demise of democracy if the filibuster rule is not changed partially, temporarily, or dispensed with for good.
Etymology of a curse on democracy...
Springing from the Dutch word for “freebooter,” filibuster is the term for pirates who pillaged the Spanish Caribbean colonies in the 18th and 19th centuries...so, for starters, not a good look for a word describing a time-honored tactical procedure in the U.S. Congress.
The filibuster gets another black eye for its link to Aaron Burr, one of the most notorious characters in American history. Among his many subversive acts, Burr famously challenged Alexander Hamilton to a duel on July 11, 1804, firing a fatal shot to the stomach of the first American Secretary of the Treasury, leading to Hamilton’s death the next day.
Burr, who had been Vice President in the early 1800s in Thomas Jefferson’s first term as president, was not renominated at Jefferson’s request--a familiar pattern of disaffection among former colleagues that continued throughout Burr’s career. George Washington, too, became estranged from Burr during the eventual outcast’s tenure in the Revolutionary Army.
Another fatal shot from Burr’s hand
But while he was Vice President, Burr fired a similarly fatal shot at American majority rule by accidentally removing a Senate rule that gave the majority the right to stop debate and force a vote on a bill, thus giving the minority party the power to deny the popular will by killing the chance for an up or down vote. Now such a minority ploy may be overcome, but the move requires a supermajority vote of 60 senators (not 66, the old “supermajority” requirement), a process called “cloture.” Whether 60 or 66 votes, however, in today’s political climate the expectation of getting any votes from the GOP side of the aisle remains a fool’s errand.
Toxic White Lady
For all of Sinema’s two-sided political stances and love for the filibuster, the arcane political tradition currently holding up federal voting rights protection and possibly other elements of Biden’s legislative package as well, Sinema has been deemed the “Toxic White Lady” in a Slate podcast and column “The Waves” by Christina Cauterucci and Julia Craven. They especially criticize Sinema’s filibuster affection as being antithetical to her supposed admiration for civil rights icon John Lewis who passed away last year and for whom the original Civil Rights bill is named. The Cauterucci/Craven team ascribes Sinema’s love of the limelight at least in part to her filibuster stance.
In the Washington Post, Sinema’s position receives a similar level of scorn. In an April 6, 2021 Post column written by veteran political reporter Greg Sargent, Sargent disproved Sinema’s arguments in restrained but nonetheless scathing precision, taking on Sinema's central claim that the filibuster engenders bi-partisanship and encourages Senators to “change their behavior and begin to work together.” Sargent said:
“This argument is not only misleading, it’s cynically misleading...Sinema concedes that the Senate is ‘broken,’ in that the parties aren’t working together. Yet we still have the filibuster. That means...its existence isn’t doing what she claims it does, i.e. facilitate bipartisanship.
“So instead of addressing that, Sinema moves the goal posts. Now the problem is the conduct and lack of civic virtue of individual Senators, irrespective of the rules. If only they could change their behavior and begin to work together, the Senate would no longer be broken. So changing the rules is not necessary.
“But the conduct of senators actually is influenced by the chamber’s rules--in exactly the opposite way from what Sinema has suggested.
“In reality, the filibuster frustrates bipartisanship. We have direct experience of this from the last Democratic presidency, that of Barack Obama: Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell relied on the filibuster to facilitate the withholding of bipartisan cooperation.”
Follow the House
If Sinema doesn’t read the Washington Post (hard to believe), she need look no farther than the U.S. House of Representatives, the other Congressional body, but the one unlike the Senate that did away with the filibuster no fewer than 133 years ago.
In a stroke of noble artifice befitting a Republican Party that had just preserved the Union by winning the Civil War—not today’s Republicans who in concert with Donald Trump are working to overturn it—a Republican House majority revoked the filibuster as an impediment to effecting the will of the people via majority
law-making.
In 1888, Republicans--like Democrats now--had just won the presidency, House, and Senate. Like Democrats in the Senate today, the 1889 Republican majority in the lower chamber was extremely small, with only a two-vote majority. Facing the prospect of the then Democratic minority dedicated, as Republicans are now, to thwarting civil and voting rights and other progressive legislation, the newly elected House Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed, a six foot, three 3 inch Civil War veteran whose appearance sported a walrus mustache and all-black attire, understood the minority could kill any bill of the majority, thus bringing a “tyranny” of the minority to the House majority who had work to do.
Using the quorum rule to include anyone in the House chamber, not just those answering “aye” to the roll call, Reed got the quorum he needed to proceed to votes on key issues, rather than pussy-foot around with whether or not there were enough Representatives present to vote. After four days, the Democrats, weary of the inconvenience of being unable to leave the House chamber at will without consequences, voted with Republicans to eliminate the filibuster.
With the House filibuster’s death, great things happened
As a result, the 51st Congress went on to pass some of the most consequential legislation in American history, including the creation of the National Parks Service, Sherman Antitrust Act, expansion of the land grant colleges bill to create Black colleges, and improvements to the pension system for Civil War veterans and beyond.
Additionally, Sinema’s insistence that the filibuster fosters bipartisan cooperation is neither supported by historical precedent nor the current reality that Republicans are not interested in cooperating with Democrats. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in May of this year said he was “100 percent focused on stopping the Biden administration,” reminiscent of an earlier promise in 2010 to make Barack Obama a one-term president, although McConnell decided it was OK to join 18 other Republicans in voting for the first--$1.9T--infrastructure bill to fortify Kentucky bridges and roads.
Since then he has also vowed not to cooperate with Democrats to raise the U.S. debt ceiling, threatening to crash the full faith and credit of the United States in the process. This marks a predictable turnaround for McConnell who, under Trump, avowed the ceiling must be raised to maintain the full faith and credit of the U.S. after the Congress passed Trump’s tax bill for the rich, immediately adding $3T to
the deficit.
Why the spoiler, Kyrsten?
So why does Sinema--whose eight-to-eleven-year-old self spent three years living in an abandoned gas station--play the spoiler to Democratic plans to aid families, like hers, who need help? Add to that, why doesn’t Sinema understand the country’s perilous position—thanks to Donald Trump and the GOP—and let the filibuster go?
Those Rich Donors
Cynically, one might answer those questions by linking back to Sinema’s rich donors. Her historical nodding to their needs over those of constituents who cannot afford to donate to her campaign appears clear. According to opensecrets.com, a non-profit organization that tracks campaign money, the financial services industry has donated to Sinema $1,716,837 in 2017-2022 campaign help.
But preserving democracy itself? That should be a no-brainer for Sinema or any other U.S. Senator. If the United States no longer continues as a free society with free elections in which the voters--not GOP state legislatures--decide the winners, the entire American experiment is finished. Senators such as Sinema will either lose their jobs altogether or continue on as powerless figureheads--affecting Sinema, her financial services donors, and everyone else.
The answer to “why?” Sinema may tempt such a tragic outcome may lie in that abandoned gas station story and the absence of total honesty that goes with it. The reasoning goes, if Sinema can lie unnecessarily about the nature of her childhood tragedy, what else can she lie about? And what or who else can she betray in addition to the truth? So, another circle back to the abandoned gas station narrative seems necessary to shed some light.
A return to the gas station
Sinema’s family ended up in the abandoned building which sat on her stepfather’s family’s property after her mother remarried following a divorce from Sinema’s biological father. An attorney, Kyrsten’s father Dan Sinema had lost his job in the recession during the Reagan presidency in the early 1980s. Sinema’s mother Marilyn then married Andy Howard, and Sinema joined her stepfather, mother, and two siblings in relocating to Andy Howard’s hometown of Defuniak Springs, Florida in the state’s panhandle.
Unemployed for three years after the move except for temporary jobs, Howard housed his family in an abandoned gas station which sat on his parents’ property. As Florida law describes anyone living in an abandoned property to be “homeless,” Sinema and her family clearly lived in extremely hard-pressed conditions. But the precise level of hardship still remains a matter of debate.
Indeed, Sinema’s claim of no electricity and running water has been partially debunked over the years by news outlets checking into the allegations. In a Sept. 18, 2018 article in the New York Times shortly after Sinema had become the Democratic Party’s nominee for retiring Republican Senator and favorite Trump target Jeff Flake’s vacant U.S. Senate seat, the paper reported on some documents that suggested the “no electricity, no running water” claim was not supported in public records. While living in an abandoned gas station certainly qualifies as an extremely challenging hardship in and of itself, the degree of adversity Sinema claims--and her level of honesty in describing it--became an issue once the documents were found.
The Sept. 24, 2019 article by the Times’ Jonathan Martin, “A Senate Candidate’s Image Shifted. Did Her Life Story?” describes the results of the paper’s looking into filed court records in connection with Sinema’s mother and father’s divorce as providing a counter-narrative to Sinema’s claim her three-year childhood home had no utilities:
“In findings from 1985 and 1986 to the judge who handled her parents
divorce, Ms. Sinema’s mother and stepfather outlined monthly
payments they made for an electric bill, phone bill, and gas bill while
living in the former gas station, which was owned by her stepfather’s
parents...”
In following up with Sinema about her parents’ court-filings, Martin reported the Senator’s non-committal response to the Times:
“As for why her stepfather listed those payments for power, gas, and a
phone if they had no electricity, Ms. Sinema paused, ‘Oh gosh, I don’t
have an answer for that...That’s not something a little kid would hear
about from her parents.’”
The no-water issue also came into question in a 2013 interview with the Washington Post when the then-Congresswoman Sinema commented that the family did in fact have a toilet in their abandoned gas station home. But when asked by the Post how the toilet could be flushed without the availability of running water, Sinema “could not explain how it was flushed with no running water.”
And in response to a 2016 article appearing in the Arizona Republic quoting the previous owner of the gas station’s assertions the building did have running water and a wood-burning stove, Sinema challenged his claims without providing evidence from other family members or anything else.
Neither Sinema’s mother nor stepfather have volunteered to or have willingly commented on the situation. According to the Times, Sinema’s mother twice hung up on the paper when calling to verify Sinema’s statements, and her stepfather refused to verify the information one way or another.
Strangely also, Sinema’s parents have either chosen or been asked to be left out of their Senator daughter’s limelight--a decision suggested by the absence of any family member at Sinema’s Jan. 3, 2019 swearing-in ceremony as U.S. Senator.
To be fair, questions about Sinema’s living conditions between the ages of 8 and 11 may seem like petty hair-splitting. After all, there is no question that living in an abandoned gas station for three years would have to be challenging for anyone, let alone an eight-to-eleven year old whose parents had recently divorced and then was forced to move across country with a new stepfather, entering new schools and making new friends.
The issue, rather, is why Sinema seems cagey about the details and may have felt the need to embellish an already compelling personal narrative, especially since she has been hard on politicians who have similarly fudged the truth.
Lies, meet Betrayal
In Sinema’s 2009 book, Unite and Conquer: How to Build Coalitions that Win and Last, Sinema derided then Congressman Paul Ryan for an alleged fairly innocuous transgression of fibbing about his marathon time, saying, “It’s always wrong to tell half-truths and be sneaky about the truth--no doubt about it.”
So why would Sinema hold politicians to a different truth standard than her own? And do Sinema’s “little white lies” about her early home life explain how easily Sinema seems to betray people who, like her and her family, at times haven’t had it so good.
Scientific studies link lying and treachery, another word for betrayal, as forms of “rule-breaking,” and they often go hand in hand.
It’s about survival...
In research conducted by Julie Fitness, head of the Psychology Department at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, Fitness said treachery down through the ages has been considered among the worst kind of crimes to one's fellow man. In a July 1, 2016 article in Psychology Today, she said:
“From an evolutionary perspective, our survival in ancestral environments within ancient tribes meant that having evolved as social beings, we critically depended on the degree to which ‘valued others’ accept and respect us.
“Betrayal could have such devastating consequences that it was vital we could develop a mechanism to detect potential ‘cheaters’ and learned only to invest our resources with colleagues who were not going to let us down.”
Sinema’s betrayal…
Can it not be said that Sinema’s refusal to, at very least, carve out an exception to the filibuster to pass federal legislation protecting minority voting freedoms and prevent Republican legislatures from destroying democracy ranks as a betrayal of her oath of office of the first order?
One only has to see and listen to Donald Trump at his latest rally in Perry, Georgia to get a sense of the high stakes game being played out right now for America’s future--a possible vision of America that Sinema or other Senators not wanting to modify the filibuster still apparently do not “get.”
Standing before a crowd of adoring fans, Trump brazenly lied full stop about the results of a four-month voting “audit” in Maricopa Country in Sinema’s home state begun by Trump supporters to “prove” Biden did not win Arizona in 2020 and
Trump did.
Trump’s pathetic lying
The results issued on Friday, September 24 reported that not only did Biden win, he did so with 360 more votes than were originally tabulated. Nevertheless, Trump on the podium blatantly lied in these words:
“We won on the Arizona audit yesterday and we won on a level you couldn’t believe
(sic).
“It is clear in Arizona they must decertify the election and those who certified it
must be sued for wrong doing. Hopefully, the Arizona Attorney General will do
more for his state than our (Georgia) AG has done in your state.”
No comment
To date, neither of the state’s two Democratic Senators, Kyrsten Sinema or Mark Kelly, have commented on the Arizona audit results, disappointing The Resistant Grandmother in their not taking the opportunity to applaud the state’s free and accurate 2020 elections as a talking point of pride.
But Trump’s rally comments made, obviously, without any respect for the truth are instructive in what awaits this country if the Senate does not pass the voting rights act, called the Freedom to Vote act, co-authored by Minnesota Senator Amy Klobucher and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin. Trump is right now gathering money, endorsing MAGA election officials candidates, and purging the Republican Party of non-believers in preparation for another presidential run in 2024.
As part of Trump’s ramp-up for getting re-elected at any cost, including rigging the election infrastructure in his favor, this year at least 18 states have adopted laws that restrict voting, such as reducing the number of drop boxes in locations with the largest minority populations.
Why the passage of the new voting legislation is crucial
But the Freedom to Vote Act now before the Senate and requiring the elimination of the filibuster for passage, would override such restrictions. All voters may request mail ballots without offering excuses, which Texas requires as a way of
discouraging voting.
The measure also requires states to offer at least 15 days of early in-person voting, register voters automatically with driver’s licenses, and offer Election Day registration right at the polls. Importantly, the bill also makes Election Day a federal holiday, making in-person voting easier for working voters. It also eliminates Georgia’s Draconian voting provision of prohibiting individuals from providing food or water to people waiting in long lines.
Importantly, the Freedom to Vote Act also protects election security in the
following ways:
* Requiring paper ballots in each state to ensure vote tabulations are free
from hackers.
* Allowing local election officials to apply for federal grants to purchase updated and
secure voting equipment.
* Requiring candidates to report to federal authorities any foreign contacts wanting
to contribute or coordinate campaign efforts.
* Curbing gerrymandering used by the GOP to maintain power disproportionally to
the popular vote.
* Requiring organizations that spend more than $10,000 to influence federal elections
to disclose donors who give $10,000 or more.
One provision not in the bill involves the reinstatement of one in the 1965 voting rights act, upended in 2013 by the U.S. Supreme Court, that would require federal approval before any new election laws that could restrict minority access to voting could go into effect.
Since Joe Manchin co-authored the legislation and West Virginia voters, according to a May voter survey, approve of such voting protections by 79 percent, it is hoped that Manchin’s involvement will shift power in the Senate toward its enactment.
That leaves Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema. According to the same May 2021 survey, voters in her state approve such a measure by 84 percent. But Sinema’s record shows by now that what voters want or need no longer ensures Sinema’s commitment. And so far Sinema is not showing her cards.
Naive, or willfully ignorant
That’s because a thumbs up on the bill would require at least a temporary relaxation of the need for a super majority, 60 votes, to dispense with the filibuster as required under the current Senate tradition rather than a simple majority (51) to pass legislation. And yet by now we know Sinema seems tied to, at best, a naive belief or, at worst, a willfully ignorant attitude that the filibuster is good for bipartisanship in the Senate.
Either way, Sinema stands on the precipice of nothing short of the dissolution of democracy if, like a willful child, she holds her political breath to become the only Democratic holdout to passing the Klobuchar-Manchin Freedom to Vote act.
If Sinema truly cherishes her country, she should take time to do some reading, starting with an essay by political theorist Robert Kagan published in the Sunday, Sept. 26 edition of the Washington Post.
A “neoconservative” scholar at the liberal Brookings Institution, Kagan possesses the prerequisite Ivy League education at Yale and Harvard coupled with years of governmental experience that anybody attempting to see politics from a larger perspective—other than just as political horse-races—values and trusts.
In his Sunday Op-ed, Kagan lays out the stakes for America if the federal government doesn’t stop the Republican Party’s fanatical attempt to remake the country into Donald Trump’s image and likeness. Not a person typically to use exaggerated language, Kagan freed himself from any “careful” restrictions in order to tell it like it is without holding back. He warned:
“The United States is heading into its greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.
“The Founders did not foresee the Trump phenomenon in part because they did not foresee national parties. They anticipated the threat of a demagogue, but not of a national cult of personality.
In fact, we’re in it
“We are already in a Constitutional crisis. The description might not come until November 2024, but critical steps in that direction are happening now. In a little more than a year, it may become impossible to pass legislation to protect the electoral process in 2024.
In terms of some Senators’ eccentric care and feeding of the outmoded Senatorial niceties that get in the way of passing needed legislation, Kagan added:
“Today’s arguments over the filibuster will seem quaint in three years if the |.
American political system enters a crisis for which the American Constitution has
no remedy.”
Describing the appeal of Trump to his cult-like followers, Kagan defines them as anti-democratic, and unconcerned “about the rights and freedoms of those who are not like them. That too is not unusual. What is unnatural is to value the rights of others who are unlike you as much as your own.”
Which is what democracy requires, and Trump rejects.
Time to put America’s needs first
To The Resistant Grandmother, Kyrsten Sinema--so far--has failed her constituents not just in Arizona but now nation-wide by putting her personal political interests above the right of all Americans to live in a free country. The most critical step in preserving freedoms now requires passing the Freedom to Vote Act by doing away partially or completely with the 60 vote filibuster. Just as the U.S. House realized 133 years ago, it’s time to do great things.
So, Senator, a serious future calls—for us, and you.
Foolish, alternate realities must go the way of little white lies about electricity, running water, and phone service in an abandoned gas station. Right now, your constituents are not just Arizonans--they’re all Americans like me who have children and grandchildren for whom living in an autocracy cannot be an option.
Save the chocolate cakes, curtsies, wigs, and lawmaker’s shell games for another day and time when the country is no longer living on a knife’s edge of Trump’s creation. Soberness of manner and urgency of action must be the work of each day and night until the Trump scourge is behind us.
C’mon, Kyrsten. America is facing its biggest crisis since the Civil War. It’s well past the time you understood this…and helped.