What's Kyrsten Sinema's Deal?
The election of Arizona Rep. Krysten Sinema to the Senate was one of the few successes the Democrats had in that chamber last Tuesday, but even before she takes office, she’s fucking up. Bad.
Sinema was chased down by the Daily Caller on Wednesday and asked if she would “work with” Senate Republicans to build President Donald Trump’s proposed wall on the southern border. Sinema’s response?
Sinema told TheDCNF she would be willing to work with Republicans on “everything.”
“I’ll work with anyone on anything,” she said, in response to a question that asked specifically if she’d work with Republicans on the border wall.
There’s a little more to the story, however:
Before the conversation with TheDCNF, Sinema was heard talking to someone in the hallway of the U.S. Capitol, saying, “I just want to get away from the press.”
When TheDCNF reporter told Sinema he was with the press, she responded by saying, “Oh, I’m trying to get away from you.”
So we have two options here. One is that Sinema has bad case of D.C. brain worms, and is so committed to bipartisanship and the abstract principle of “getting things done” that she’s willing to help Trump build his racist fucking wall. Two, which might be even dumber, is that she was so dead set on escaping the questions of a Daily Caller guy that she told him what he wanted to hear.
If that doesn’t sound that bad to you, let me reiterate: she told a guy from the Daily Caller what he wanted to hear.
The depressing thing is that even if it was the former, supporting Trump’s racist wall wouldn’t exactly be a complete departure from how Sinema—who was an anti-war lefty in a previous life—behaved as a congresswoman. Sinema, whose Senate role model is Joe Manchin, voted with Trump 62 percent of the time in the last Congress—despite the fact that Hillary Clinton won her congressional district in 2016 by 17 points. (Arizona, as a whole, went for Trump by less than 4 points in 2016. We’re not exactly talking about West Virginia here.)
And even if Sinema still believes, as she said in 2017, that the wall “is a waste of taxpayer money and won’t keep us safe”—suspect reasons for not supporting it, but all right—she voted for the bill last year that would have funded the damn thing, and for a resolution earlier this year to basically say that ICE rules. Fuck that!
If you looked at the fact that Arizona swung a substantial 5 points towards the Democrats in the 2016 election, and then two years later elected its first Democratic senator in thirty years, it’d be reasonable to say that Arizona wants a Democrat. Instead, Sinema is poised to give the state the second coming of Jeff Flake—either in an overarching need to please people or in frowning about Trump’s rhetoric while supporting most of his agenda.