Maverick-ey Sinema
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There’s a disconnect between what everyday Americans want and deserve from our politics, and what political parties are offering.
I am privileged to represent Arizonans of all backgrounds and beliefs in the U.S. Senate and am honored to travel to every corner of our state, listening to your concerns and ideas.
While Arizonans don’t all agree on the issues, we are united in our values of hard work, common sense and independence.
We make our own decisions, using our own judgment and lived experiences to form our beliefs. We don’t line up to do what we’re told, automatically subscribe to whatever positions the national political parties dictate or view every issue through labels that divide us.
Each day, Arizonans wake up, work and live alongside people with different views and experiences, usually without even thinking about partisan politics.
Arizonans expect our leaders to follow that example – set aside political games, work together, make progress and then get out of the way so we can build better lives for ourselves and our families.
It’s no surprise that Washington, D.C., often fails to reflect that expectation.
Everyday Americans are increasingly left behind by national parties’ rigid partisanship, which has hardened in recent years. Pressures in both parties pull leaders to the edges, allowing the loudest, most extreme voices to determine their respective parties’ priorities and expecting the rest of us to fall in line.
In catering to the fringes, neither party has demonstrated much tolerance for diversity of thought. Bipartisan compromise is seen as a rarely acceptable last resort, rather than the best way to achieve lasting progress. Payback against the opposition party has replaced thoughtful legislating.
Americans are told that we have only two choices – Democrat or Republican – and that we must subscribe wholesale to policy views the parties hold, views that have been pulled further and further toward the extremes.
Most Arizonans believe this is a false choice, and when I ran for the U.S. House and the Senate, I promised Arizonans something different. I pledged to be independent and work with anyone to achieve lasting results. I committed I would not demonize people I disagreed with, engage in name-calling, or get distracted by political drama.
I wonder who she'll caucus with. "Independents" like Sanders and King caucus with the Dems.
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Yeah, she expects to keep her committee assignments, and Schumacher controls those assignments. Will be hard to keep her committee assignments if she does not caucus with the Democrats.
Will be interesting to see if she's challenged by a Democrat in the 2024 election.
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https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/09/sinema-arizona-senate-independent-00073216
Unlike independent Sens. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and Angus King (Maine), Sinema won’t attend weekly Democratic Caucus meetings, but she rarely does that now. She isn’t sure whether her desk will remain on the Democratic side of the Senate floor.
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Interesting column at NRO. Some takeaways:
Beyond the lofty language, what this really reflects is the fact that it would be a challenge for her to win in a Democratic primary.
Outright switching parties didn’t make much sense. Sinema is still effectively a Democrat. She backed President Biden’s $1.9 trillion left-wing spending spree that helped fuel inflation, and his climate and Obamacare-expansion bill, and is radically pro-abortion. Overall, she has voted against her party just 3 percent of the time. She just hasn’t been willing to go whole hog in embracing radical actions to advance progressivism. Most notably, she has opposed ideas such as blowing up the filibuster and packing the courts, and her objections created roadblocks that contributed to the death of Biden’s $3.5 trillion progressive wish list branded as Build Back Better. That has made her a hate figure among the progressive activists who control the Democratic Party, who even took to following her into a bathroom to harass her.
So, looking toward a potential 2024 reelection campaign, there was a very real chance that Sinema could have followed the same fate as Joe Lieberman in 2006. The former Connecticut senator had taken heat from his party for remaining supportive of the Iraq War, and he lost the Democratic nomination to an anti-war darling of the left, Ned Lamont. After losing, instead of backing Lamont in the general, Lieberman switched parties and won as an independent, further angering liberals.So clearly, Sinema wanted to get a head start in branding herself as an independent to Arizonans. Assuming she decides to run, Democrats will have to make a difficult decision as to whether to run their own candidate, and risk splitting the vote and losing the seat to a Republican, or accepting somebody who will vote with Democrats on most issues. A situation in which there’s Sinema as an independent as well as a Democratic candidate on the November ballot is one in which you can see a Kari Lake get elected to the Senate.
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The popular progressive US senator Bernie Sanders would consider supporting any Democrat who might mount a challenge against his chamber colleague Kyrsten Sinema after she recently left the party and declared herself an independent like him, arguing that she has “helped sabotage” some of Congress’s most important legislation.
Sanders’s comments on Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union added to the chorus of detractors against the Arizona lawmaker who has undermined the agenda of the Joe Biden White House and other progressives, including by voting down raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and reforming the Senate filibuster so that voting rights legislation can pass.
The independent from Vermont who votes in line with Democratic interests told the show host, Dana Bash, that the leftwing party’s members in Arizona were “not all that enthusiastic about somebody who helped sabotage some of the most important legislation that protects the interests of working families and voting rights and so forth”.
And, Sanders added, if Arizona Democrats eventually ran someone to challenge the newly-declared independent, “I will take a hard look at” supporting that candidate, though some are concerned that hopeful could unwittingly give Republicans an opening.
“I support progressive candidates all over this country – people who have the guts to take on special interests,” said Sanders, adding that he wasn’t interested in speaking much more on Sinema. “I don’t know what’s going to be happening in Arizona – we will see who they nominate.”
Sinema voted along the Joe Biden's policies more than...
(checks notes)
According to a FiveThirtyEight analysis, Sinema has voted with Biden 93 percent of the time, which is more often than Sanders, who has voted in line with the president's agenda 91 percent of the time.
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Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego announced Monday he will run for the Arizona U.S. Senate seat currently held by centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema …
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Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego announced Monday he will run for the Arizona U.S. Senate seat currently held by centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema …
@Axtremus said in Maverick-ey Sinema:
Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego announced Monday he will run for the Arizona U.S. Senate seat currently held by centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema …
So, this becomes a 3-way race, right?
Unnamed GOP candidate
"Independent" Sinema
Democrat Gallego
