A Sinema From Hell-- Blame Chuck Schumer

"Free At Last" by Nancy Ohanian

When Chuck Schumer decided he wanted Kyrsten Sinema as the Democratic candidate for the Arizona Senate seat— and would clear the field of potential primary opponents— she had the single worst voting record of any House Democrat and was the chair of the reactionary Blue Dog caucus. Schumer isn’t stupid; he knew what he was getting, even if not exactly how rapidly her degeneration would accelerate once she was a senator. I’ve known her since she was in the state legislature and it was always just a matter of time for her to sink to the bottom of any snf every pile she ever jumped on. She’s no longer even a Democrat.

In some ways Manchin is still worse than she is, but it’s just around the margins. Yesterday, The Atlantic published a somewhat stilted, grudging, defensive interview with her conducted by McKay Coppins, who isn’t exactly a fanboy: “Sinema knows what everybody says about her. She pretends not to read the press coverage— ‘I don’t really care’— but she knows. She knows what her colleagues call her behind her back (‘egomaniac,’ ‘traitor’).”

Sinema tells me that there are several popular narratives about her in the media, all of them “inaccurate.” One is that she’s “mysterious,” “mercurial,” “an enigma”— that she makes her decisions on unknowable whims. She regards this portrayal as “fairly absurd”: “I think I’m a highly predictable person.”

“Then,” she goes on, “there’s the she’s just doing what’s best for her and not for her state or for her country” narrative. “And I think that’s a strange narrative, particularly when you contrast it with”— here she pauses, and then smirks— “ya know, the facts.”

You can see, in moments like these, why she bothers people. She speaks in a matter-of-fact staccato, her tone set frequently to smug. She says things like “I am a long-term thinker in a short-term town” and “I prefer to be successful.” The overall effect, if you’re not charmed by it (and a lot of her Republican colleagues are), is condescension bordering on arrogance. Sinema, who graduated from high school at 16 and college at 18, carries herself like she is unquestionably the smartest person in the room.

No one would mistake her for being dumb, though. In the past two years, Sinema has been at the center of virtually every major piece of bipartisan legislation passed by the Senate, negotiating deals on infrastructure, guns, and a bill that codifies the right to same-sex marriage. She has also become a villain to the left, proudly standing in the way of Democrats’ more ambitious agenda by refusing to eliminate the filibuster. The tension culminated with her announcement in December that she was leaving the Democratic Party and registering as an independent.

…The truth, according to Sinema herself, is that there is no ideological core to discover.

I learn this when I describe for Sinema the story I hear most often about her: that she started out as an idealistic progressive activist—organizing protests against the Iraq War, marching for undocumented immigrants in 100-degree heat, leading the effort to defeat a gay-marriage ban in Arizona—but that gradually she sold out her youthful idealism and morphed into a Washington moderate who pals around with Republicans and protects tax breaks for hedge-fund managers.

To my surprise, Sinema doesn’t really push back on this one. For one thing, she tells me, she’s proud that she outgrew the activism of her youth. It was, in her own assessment, “a spectacular failure.”

I ask her to elaborate.

“Well,” she says, with a derisive shrug. “You can make a poster and stand out on the street, but at the end of the day all you have is a sunburn. You didn’t move the needle. You didn’t make a difference … I set about real quick saying, ‘This doesn’t work.’”

It’s not just the activism she’s discarded; it’s also the left-wing politics. Sinema, who described herself in 2006 as “the most liberal legislator in the state of Arizona,” freely admits that she’s much less progressive than she used to be. While her critics contend that she adjusted her politics to win statewide office in Arizona, she chalks up the evolution to “age and maturity.” She bristles at the idea that politicians shouldn’t be allowed to change their mind. “Imagine a world in which everybody who represented you refused to grow or change or learn if presented with new information,” she tells me. “That’s very dangerous for our democracy. So perhaps what I’m most proud of is that I’m a lifelong learner.”

Let me jump in here for a second. I knew her when she was pretending to be progressive. You had to be an idiot to believe the pretense. She was obviously never committed to any values— only to herself and her career. We served on a board together and it was hard not to see her as borderline insane. I asked her progressive colleagues in the Arizona state Senate. Everyone I spoke with told me she was a phony and that she wasn’t fooling anyone. No one is surprised that she went down the darkest of political dark paths and everyone who knows her wonders how long it will take before she officially becomes a Republican.

Back to Coppins, who wrote that “Sinema insists that people overstate how much she’s changed. Leaving the Democratic Party was, in her telling, a kind of homecoming. ‘I’m not a joiner,’ she says. ‘It’s not my thing.’ She points out that she wasn’t a Democrat when she started in politics. I point out that at the time she was aligned with the Green Party. She demurs. ‘I never think about where [my position] is on the political spectrum, because I don’t care,’ she tells me. ‘People will say, Oh, we don’t know what her position is. Well, I may not have one yet. And I know that’s weird in this town, but I actually want to do all of the research, get as much knowledge as possible, spend all of the time doing the work before I make a decision.’ I ask her if there’s any ideological through line at all that explains the various votes she’s taken in the Senate. She thinks about it before answering, ‘No.’”

She says she’s guided by an unchanging set of “values”— she mentions freedom, opportunity, and security— that virtually all Americans share. When it comes to legislating, Sinema sees herself as “practical”— a dealmaker, a problem solver. And if taking every policy question on a case-by-case basis bewilders some in Washington, Sinema says it’s just her nature…

[W]hen progressives criticize her as flaky, dilettantish, or out of her depth, it strikes her as fundamentally gendered. More than any other line of attack, this seems to really bother her. She points to Democratic Representative Ro Khanna, who said in 2021 that Sinema lacked “the basic competence” to be in Congress.

“I mean, when there are … elected officials who say ‘She’s in over her head,’ or ‘She’s not substantive,’ or ‘She doesn’t know what she’s talking about— that is, um, absurd,” she tells me, her tone sharpening. “Because I know every detail of every piece of legislation. And it’s okay if others don’t. They weren’t in the room when we were writing it.” She added that Khanna “doesn’t know me, and I don’t know him. The term colleague is to be loosely applied there.” (Asked for comment, Khanna told me that he’d criticized Sinema during the debate over the Build Back Better bill “because she was unwilling to explain her position and engage with the press, her colleagues, and the public.”)

The result of all the laborious gun-control negotiations was the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which was signed into law last June. The law expanded background checks for gun buyers under 21, enhanced mental-health services in schools, and provided funding for states to implement “red-flag laws,” which allow authorities to temporarily confiscate guns from individuals deemed dangerous. Critics on the left dismissed the law as a half measure. But to Sinema, the fact that she and her colleagues made any progress on such an intractable issue was validation for her method of operating.

…Before departing her hideaway, I return to Sinema’s central argument— that her approach “works.” It’s hard to evaluate objectively. What to make of a senator who leaves her party, professes to have no ideological agenda, and yet manages to wield outsize influence in writing the laws of the nation? Some might look at her record and see a hollow careerism that prizes bipartisanship for its own sake. Others might argue that in highly polarized times, politicians like her are necessary to grease the gears of a dysfunctional government.

One thing is clear, though: If Sinema wants to persuade other political leaders to take the same path she has taken, she’ll need to demonstrate that it’s electorally viable. So far, the polls in Arizona suggest she would struggle to get reelected as an independent in 2024; she already has challengers on the right and the left. A survey earlier this year found that she was among the most unpopular senators in the country.

Sinema tells me she hasn’t decided yet whether she’ll seek reelection, but she talks like someone who’s not planning on it. She’s only 46 years old; she has other interests. “I’m not only a senator,” she tells me. “I’m also lots of other things.” I ask if she worries about what lessons will be drawn in Washington if her independent turn leads to the end of her political career.

She pauses and answers with a smirk: “I don’t worry about hypotheticals.”

It isn’t just DC and her colleagues in Congress; her constituents hate her as well. The most recent polling shows that she’s highly unpopular with Arizona voters— even more so with Democrats that with Republicans. Her net favorability is -19 among Democrats, -6 among independents and -4 among Republicans. I can see why she’s thinking about not running for her Senate seat again.

Meanwhile, though, she’s raising money hand over fist from the filthiest special interests. “Sinema's campaign raised over $2.1 million in the first quarter of this year, with over half of that coming from donors who gave at least $3,300— the maximum per-election individual donation to a Senate campaign. More than 30% of the Democrat-turned-independent's haul this quarter came from employees of just five major companies, including hedge funds, investment groups and private equity firms. She received $287,000 from employees of Blackstone, the major investment firm, and its affiliates, as well as almost $196,000 from employees of the Carlyle Group and its affiliates, according to a NBC News analysis of her campaign finance filing. Sinema also received over $51,000 from employees of Elliott Advisors and their affiliates, over $71,000 from employees of Ryan LLC, and over $53,000 from employees of the firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and its subsidiaries… Sinema's first-quarter donors also include a number of prominent Republicans, like Blackstone's Stephen Schwarzman, one of the most prolific GOP super PAC donors in the 2022 election cycle. KKR's Ken Mehlman, a former George W. Bush campaign manager and Bush-era Republican National Committee chair, also donated to Sinema in the first three months of 2023.”

She’s also taking big bucks from the corrupt cryptocurrency industry-- and has changed her posture towards them in the process. “The windfall from the crypto industry completes a two-year arc for Sinema, who went from being a proponent of regulations that some crypto giants opposed to a force for compromise with the industry. The softened legislation on regulations fell by the wayside, though Sinema’s crypto donations kept pouring in. In the last three years, Sinema has taken in almost a half a million dollars from crypto businesses and investors. In 2021, as her position on regulating crypto eased, she raised at least $175,000 in campaign cash from the industry. Between 2022 and 2023, her campaign has received more than $330,000 from crypto companies and firms with crypto holdings.” They bought her.

Have you seen "The Bad Seed?"

UPDATE: Courtesy of our dear friends at Twitter. (I wonder who ratted me out. Sinema? Schumer? Stephen Schwarzman? Some random MAGAt?