US Senator Kyrsten Sinema to leave democrat party, register as Independent.

[ronntaylor]

I'm not opposed to bipartisan legislating, I favor it when it is for something that feels like a third rail for either party to take on separately but the country needs. But I don't favor it when the bill becomes a Christmas tree for donors and perpetual campaigners in CongressCritter clothes, and the substance of the bill ends up short of teeth or money to implement properly. These guys are supposed to work for benefit of constituents, not just K street and captains of industry.

Exactly! Sinema (and Manchin obviously) only cares for her donors, present and potential. The amount of legislation changed to fit her donors' needs is disgusting. Especially given her run for the Senate and what those voters expected given her rhetoric and history before her run. I don't recall anyone becoming that outright sleazy and avaricious in all the years I've followed politics.

Her censure by the State party and her extremely low positive rating among AZ Dem voters means there's no way she'll run in the Dem primary. She'll have no ground game and there's been nearly a year of intense efforts to get another Dem the line for 2024.

Shumer and Dem PACs have an easy out for 2024: they will only support Dems for primaries. So unless Sinema is going to pull a Bernie, which I doubt would work in AZ, she can expect no funds from Dem coffers. IIRC, at least one poll of Dem voters had Gallego cleaning her clock, more than 3-to-1. And that was well before her latest stunt.

 

[Alli]

I have seen a few posts in social media recommending that Biden offer Sinema some minor cabinet position or perhaps an ambassadorship to somewhere tropical and peaceful, allowing Hobbs to appoint an actual Democrat for the remainder of the term. I like it.

 

[lizkat]

I have seen a few posts in social media recommending that Biden offer Sinema some minor cabinet position or perhaps an ambassadorship to somewhere tropical and peaceful, allowing Hobbs to appoint an actual Democrat for the remainder of the term. I like it.

[takes out map of the Indonesian archipelago... perhaps one of those 17,000 islands could declare independence and find itself in need of an American consulate]

 

[Roller]

I have seen a few posts in social media recommending that Biden offer Sinema some minor cabinet position or perhaps an ambassadorship to somewhere tropical and peaceful, allowing Hobbs to appoint an actual Democrat for the remainder of the term. I like it.

I don't think she'd accept either offer. She knows she'd be in an obscure position where she wouldn't have any national attention or influence. She's tying her political future to the hope that, as an Independent, she'll draw general election support from moderate Democrats and Republicans, since she could very well lose against a more progressive opponent in a Democratic primary.

 

[Alli]

I don't think she'd accept either offer. She knows she'd be in an obscure position where she wouldn't have any national attention or influence. She's tying her political future to the hope that, as an Independent, she'll draw general election support from moderate Democrats and Republicans, since she could very well lose against a more progressive opponent in a Democratic primary.

Stick a fork in her.

 

[Edd]

I think there’s faster tracks to being a Fox News contributor but I can be naive.

 

[GermanSuplex]

Yes, I agree with @lizkat that while Manchin can be annoying, he comes across as more sincere in his political calculations than Synema. He likes the attention too, but he’s taken some very tough votes with democrats that could have put his seat in peril many times. And let’s face it, unlike Arizona. it’s probably Manchin or nobody, and I’d take him over losing to a Trump Republican.

He still seems interested in being a senator. I don’t know what Synema’s goals are, but it doesn’t appear to be true bipartisanship. Elected officials should be working for the people of their districts/states first, whereas Synema seems to be voting and working for herself first, with the actual governing being something that she has to deal with on her path to more money and influence.

I really don’t care if people switch parties, but I hate when it’s done for ulterior motives. Synema won a tight race during the Trump presidency and there’s not been some giant shift in the political world to where she had a sudden realization her beliefs don’t align with the party. She was either not a democrat when she ran, or is selling out. As mentioned, it’s no coincidence at all she waited until the results of the GA runoff to announce this.

 

[lizkat]

She was either not a democrat when she ran, or is selling out.

Either way, the executive committee of the AZ state Democratic Party formally censured her back in January of 2022 for having helped torpedo advancement of voting rights legislation, via voting against a rules change to reform of the filbuster on a one-time basis to allow that legislation to pass with 51 votes instead of 60. Sinema and Manchin both voted against it and the one-time rule reform measure was defeated in the Senate 52-48 (twice), once in the fall of 2021, essentially derailing the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and again early in 2022, derailing that bill again in combination with another voting rights bill, the Freedom to Vote Act.

Arizona Democrats have censured Kyrsten Sinema over her pro-filibuster vote

The symbolic action comes as Sinema has come under criticism from progressive groups in Arizona after she voted to uphold the filibuster in the Senate.

www.npr.org

Democrats in Arizona were furious (Sinema had flipped a red seat in 2018 running with progressive Dems' support) and it has been a long stated policy of the AZ Dem Party that they support ditching the filibuster entirely. Sinema has said she supports the voting rights acts, but she would not facilitate passage via even a one-time filibuster rule change.

That was problematic in the extreme as a matter of party discipline, and the state party decided to recognize that by their censure, although censures are becoming problematic themselves really: the recipients tend to regard them as badges of honor rather than shame. Sinema had been warned in advance back in September of the possibility of the censure and of potential withdrawal of support for her re-election effort in 2024. She shrugged off the censure and recited her usual litany of having promised Arizonans only independence not partisan lockstep.

However, the censure and the backlash from progressives in Arizona are clearly figuring into her calculations about the slim-to-nil chance she has of making the ballot in 2024 as a Democrat.

So as a first and fairly cost-free step, she made this switch to register as an indie. The rest of her calculation about 2024 is more complex. She will like to see who steps up to run as a Dem, and whether Republicans might be inclined to defer to her on an R ballot if she takes the next steps and caucuses with them... and then actually switches parties. So far she has only arranged with Schumer to keep her D committee assignments, but it's early days.