You might think that Kyrsten Sinema would be cheered by her fellow Arizona Democrats for acting like a moderate and making it at least possible that they could be re-elected despite Arizona’s generally conservative attitude and the massive wave of anti-Brandon sentiment that’s sweeping the country.
While that would be reasonable to think, it’d be wrong; the Arizona Democratic Party’s executive board just voted to censure Sen. Sinema for daring to stand up to Brandon and preserve the filibuster by voting with Republicans to keep it in place.
The Arizona Democratic Party, apparently looking at a present difficulty rather than into the future, is furious that her refusal to nuke the filibuster means that Democrats won’t be able to pass their “voting rights” legislation or other unpopular bills, as they’ll need 60 votes to move past any GOP filibuster.
Discussing her censure, Just the News reports that the Arizona Democratic PArty spokeswoman, Raquel Teran, said:
“As a party, our job is to support our Democratic candidates, and we appreciate Senator Sinema’s leadership in passing the American Rescue Plan and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. However, we are also here to advocate for our constituents and the ramifications of failing to pass federal legislation that protects their right to vote are too large and far-reaching.
While we take no pleasure in this announcement, the ADP Executive Board has decided to formally censure Senator Sinema as a result of her failure to do whatever it takes to ensure the health of our democracy.”
Sinema, however, will likely care less about Raquel’s displeasure than the satisfaction that comes with standing up for a key institution of the Senate, about which she gave a brilliant speech and said:
But what is the legislative filibuster other than a tool that requires new federal policy to be broadly supported by Senators representing a broader cross-section of Americans – a guardrail, inevitably viewed as an obstacle by whoever holds the Senate majority, but which in reality ensures that millions of Americans represented by the minority party have a voice in the process?
Demands to eliminate this threshold (from whichever party holds the fleeting majority) amount to a group of people separated on two sides of a canyon, shouting to their colleagues that the solution to their shared challenges is to make that rift both wider and deeper.
Additionally, given that she described nuking the filibuster as something that would “worsen the underlying disease of division affecting our country” in that same speech, it’s doubtful that a mostly symbolic action coming from the Arizona Democratic Party’s non-name spokeswoman would really change her mind.
West Virginia is yet to censure Joe Manchin for not voting to nuke the filibuster; whether because it’s full of sane people that understand his doing so will likely make him more popular given the unpopularity of Brandon and his agenda or for some other reason, not doing so was almost certainly the right call.
In any case, perhaps Sinema’s censure will push her even farther away from the Democrats and weaken Joe yet further.
By: Gen Z Conservative, editor of GenZConservative.com. Follow me on Parler and Gettr.
This story syndicated with permission from Will – Trending Politics