Good Riddance, Kyrsten Sinema

The buzzkill is leaving the party

Kyrsten Sinema made official what has been clear since January 2021: She is no longer a member of the Democratic Party.

The Arizona senator announced Friday morning that she is registering as an independent. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was given the heads on Thursday evening. The decision cuts short the celebratory mood that accompanied Sen. Rev. Raphael Warnock’s decisive victory in the Georgia runoff, which had seemingly given Democrats a clear 51-49 majority in the chamber.

Sinema isn’t registering as a Republican, she told Politico, though she will officially stop attending the Democratic caucus lunches that she’s generally blown off for the past two years. “Nothing will change about my values or my behavior,” she promised, which is more a threat than any sort of reassurance. Further platitudes were offered in a nauseatingly self-righteous published op-ed in the Arizona Republic.

“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,” Sinema wrote in the newspaper.

It’s the sort of cynical false equivalence that the turncoat lawmaker has made her trademark over the past few years, as if Democrats and Republicans are equally rational and the space between produces the policies that best serve a majority of Americans.

Sinema is too smart to know that this is anything close to the truth — the left wants to provide people with free health care, the right tried to violently overthrow the government last year — but it works rhetorically for political a media that filters its coverage through a similar worldview. It allows her to get away with upholding the filibuster under the guise of bipartisanship, even if it only advantages a minority party intent on scuttling crucial progress and the guarantee of fundamental rights, and gives her the room to negotiate deals with Republicans that always benefits corporations and their lobbyists more than anybody else.

More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS

NEW: We've obtained footage of @SenatorSinema addressing Arizona's largest business group about the PRO Act. "The way I make decisions on behalf of Arizona & for our constituents is by listening to the business leaders" she assures them. She never mentions listening to workers.

What exactly this means for the Democrats’ clear control of Senate committees, and thereby their ability to confirm judges and issue subpoenas in investigations, is unclear at the moment. But her claim that this change better represents Arizonans, as Sinema argues in both her op-ed and the interviews published this morning, is belied by the fact that the state just re-elected Sen. Mark Kelly, who ran as an unambiguous Democrat in an election that was supposed to produce a bloodbath for the party. Arizonans knew that re-electing Kelly was critical to helping Democrats keep the Senate, and they handed him a five-point victory.

This shiv in the Democratic Party’s side completes Sinema’s journey from hard-left member of the Green Party to full-blown corporate hack. Everyone deserves some leeway for political transformation, and evolving is healthy, but despite what she writes in her op-ed, Sinema was not elected as some independent maverick.

Instead, she was more than happy to benefit from the hard work of Hispanic grassroots activists, who had spent nearly a decade up to that point organizing and working to build power in a state that had proven politically hostile to them. She claimed then and now to support immigration reform, protecting reproductive rights, and preserving democracy, but her actions in the Senate have proven otherwise. Instead, Sinema has very explicitly worked for corporate donors and lobbyists, fighting to preserve tax loopholes for the wealthy, prevent corporate tax increases, and stop any true investment in social services.

Sinema was not ambiguous in her feelings toward Democratic critics

In a sense, this is the final slap in the face to those activists, who spent two years trying desperately to get her to even meet with them, only to be given the brush off time and again as Sinema made her way to big fundraisers with lobbyists. Always with a smug smile on her face, self-satisfied and unwilling to even pretend to care about her constituents’ concerns.

“We have not been able to have a sit down conversation with the senator this entire year,” Stephanie Maldonado, the organizing director for LUCHA, told me last fall. “We have had rallies and actions outside of her office when we’ve known she's here in state during her recess; there have been thousands of calls; we have been driven to her office and sent endless amounts of emails and letters. We’ve used all of the strategies to engage with her, and like many of the groups we engage with, we have yet to have a sit down conversation with the senator.”

As I reported then, LUCHA began revving up for a bare-knuckles primary challenge last winter, and soon after that, the Arizona Democratic Party formally censured Sinema for refusing to budge on the filibuster that killed voting rights protections despite representing a state being ripped apart by far-right lunatics.

Polls made it clear that she would be doomed in any primary battle, and with Rep. Ruben Gallego making noise about launching a campaign, she had a few choices: Try to be a better Democrat and shore up her left flank, become an independent, or just retire to be a lobbyist and sit on the boards of corporations that she worked so hard to represent in the Senate.

The 2024 cycle presented a brutal gauntlet of Senate races for Democrats even before this news broke. It’s unclear whether Sinema will run for re-election, and if she does, whether Democrats will put up a strong candidate against her, as her presence as the third candidate could throw the election to Republicans. Not that she would care — she’s already been working hard to ensure the failure of every major Democratic initiative.

After Warnock won on Tuesday evening, many Democrats rejoiced that they wouldn’t have to rely so heavily on Sinema (or Joe Manchin) to get things done. As noted above, this will complicate remaining party ambitions. Still, we’ve least now been freed of having to tiptoe around, hoping to avoid the worst. The switch will ultimately end Sinema’s career as a public servant, if you could even call her that now, and she will go on to become yet another forgotten hack who cashed in on K-Street, temporarily wealthy but morally bankrupt.

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