Exclusive: Sinema Primary Challenge Campaign on the Verge of Official Launch
Exclusive: Sinema Primary Challenge Campaign on the Verge of Official Launch
"It'll be all gloves are off"
Welcome to a semi-premium Thursday edition of Progressives Everywhere!
I usually send out the Thursday email to premium subscribers only, but given the weight of today’s news, the urgency of the moment, and the story I have to report, I’m sending the first half of this email to everyone.
The strength of the conservative movement’s death grip on our political system was on full display on Thursday, when multiple branches of the federal government essentially said “good luck, suckers” to a vast majority of the American public.
First, Kyrsten Sinema pledged fealty to the filibuster, all but sinking the last ditch effort to pass voting rights legislation and turn back the onslaught of voter suppression and election rigging happening nationwide.
Then, the Supreme Court, with a conservative majority achieved through an exception to the filibuster, used specious legal justifications to strike down the Biden administration’s employer vaccine mandate.
Tonight’s newsletter is about the growing campaign to hold Sinema’s feet to the fire, which would unlock solutions to many of the problems plaguing the Democratic Party right now. And though it feels like a long shot, there has been significant — and promising — movement over the past nine hours.
Then, premium subscribers will be treated to positive news updates from legislatures across the country. It’s sometimes hard to believe, but some good things are happening!
Kyrsten Sinema is famous for wearing colorful wigs, but today, she functionally put on a white hood.
As President Biden headed to the Capitol to convince the Senate Democratic caucus to ditch the filibuster in order to pass crucial voting rights legislation, Sinema took to the floor of the Senate to reiterate her refusal to change the chamber’s rules.
In doing so, Sinema all but doomed the Freedom to Vote and John Lewis Voting Rights Restoration Acts. The bills, which were combined late Wednesday night in a procedural move by the House of Representatives, would have overturned or challenged nearly two dozen new voter suppression laws and a raft of extreme gerrymanders passed by Republicans in states across the country over the past year.
She also may have triggered her own demise, as I detail below.
Shortly thereafter, fellow conservative holdout Joe Manchin issued his own illogical statement in defense of the filibuster. Given Democrats’ lagging poll numbers and the fanaticism of the Republican candidates running in key races across the country, the midterm elections may well be the last even semi-fair elections held in this country for a very long time.
It’s almost not worth dissecting their professed rationales for sticking with the filibuster given their clear cynicism and disinterest in the truth, but Sinema’s speech deserves recognition as perhaps the consequential acts of trolling in modern Senate history.
In defending the indefensible, Sinema chastised Democratic leaders for not working harder to do the impossible: get Republicans on board with voting rights legislation or rules changes. It would be crass to accuse her of not caring about voting rights, she insisted, just because she stood by her conviction that preserving a procedural maneuver historically used to block civil rights and voting rights reform was more important.
Not content to offer vague bad faith criticisms, Sinema then zeroed in on the past three months as the time when Democrats should have been reaching out across the aisle — a period of time when Sinema was busy killing Democrats’ economic agenda and collecting big checks from corporate lobbyists. Oh, and trying to get an undocumented kid deported.
The Democratic caucus then retreated to their scheduled meeting with Biden, which included a long Q&A session in which Manchin made another hash of history and Sinema sat smug and silent in the back of the room.
Gathering Clouds in Arizona
It’s unclear what comes next; Biden hosted Sinema and Manchin at the White House this evening, but few details have emerged about that meeting. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says he will bring the voting rights package up for debate next Tuesday, which could force the duo to officially vote against the rule change necessary to bend the filibuster. If that happens, Sinema will be firing the starting gun on her own primary challenge.
Sinema Primary Pledge, one of several groups that formed this past fall to pressure the senator into dropping her fixation with the filibuster and supporting the Democratic agenda, has raised over $110,000 since the end of September. If the rule changes come up for a vote in the Senate and Sinema indeed follows through with her promise to vote against any adjustments to the filibuster, the money is removed from escrow and released to the campaign.
“Then it’ll be all gloves off,” Belén Sisa, a founder of the Sinema Primary Challenge, told me this afternoon. “We gave you a chance and you decided to not do what the people of Arizona asked.”
The Primary Sinema Pledge is bifurcating its financial power to follow an inside-outside plan that does more than make a lump sum donation to a politician. Half of the money it raises will be dispensed to local grassroots organizations that have been crucial to turning Arizona blue and have led the fight to hold Sinema accountable. That list includes LUCHA, the Hispanic-led group that has sent members to protest at a number of of Sinema’s high-dollar fundraisers.
Progressives Everywhere spoke with the organizing director of LUCHA about their efforts in October.
“It's going to take years to build up a primary challenger that's going to be strong enough because she is a fundraising machine,” Sisa says. “It's gonna be the bad guys versus the underdog in this situation, and it's because she's just so backed by corporate interests and the Chamber of Commerce.”
Then again, Sinema may be in danger of losing the backing of an even more important constituency. Arizona Democratic Party chair Raquel Terán put out a blistering statement today that called Sinema out by name for choosing the filibuster over the rights of her constituents. Arizona Republicans last year passed a series of voter suppression laws and have several more teed up for the new legislative session.
Multiple sources tell me that this may not be the last time that the Arizona Democrats officially express their displeasure with Sinema — they have a censure measure written up this fall that is just waiting to be executed.
Whether the ADP officially endorses another candidate or not, challengers will not hurt for initial financial support. The other half of the money raised by the Sinema Primary Pledge will go to a primary candidate that the group’s board deems the best and most progressive alternative to the widely loathed senator.
Rep. Ruben Gallego, widely rumored to be considering a primary challenge, called Sinema out by name in a speech on the House floor almost immediately after hers concluded.
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