"For years, Sinema was on the receiving end of a... single-target PAC.... [W]hatever you think of Sinema, the effort against her..."

".... is... likely to speed up some of the most brutal trends in politics... The Replace Sinema super PAC, by contrast, existed solely to run robust oppo research on, buy ads against, pitch unflattering media stories about and otherwise hound, harry and hector one solitary elected official.... Why raise money to merely spend a year messing with a political rival when you can do it for an entire six-year term? There are a lot of underemployed off-year Washington operatives who could embrace that kind of mission."

Writes Michael Schaffer, in "An Obscure Group Hounded Kyrsten Sinema for Years — and It Worked. Is This a Sign of Things to Come? The Replace Sinema super PAC had the sole goal of ousting the senator — but may inspire a new model of endless campaigning" (Politico).

"What’s next for Sinema after her Senate term runs out this year?... A vanity presidential campaign from corporate-backed No Labels...?"

That's a quote from an article I found when I was looking for discussion of whether Kyrsten Sinema will be the No Labels candidate for President.

It's in The New Republic and, for the most part, it's not the sort of thing I was looking for, as indicated by the really inflammatory headline: "Kyrsten Sinema Is Resigning in the Most Sinema Fashion Ever (Delusional)/Farewell to the 'independent' Arizona senator who did nothing but screw over all her constituents, along with the rest of the country."

"Those lunches were ridiculous.... I’m not caucusing with the Democrats.... Old dudes are eating Jell-O, everyone is talking about how great they are..."

"I don’t really need to be there for that. That’s an hour and a half twice a week that I can get back.... The Northerners and the Westerners put cool whip on their Jell-O and the Southerners put cottage cheese.... I spend my days doing productive work, which is why I’ve been able to lead every bipartisan vote that’s happened the last two years."

Said Kyrsten Sinema, quoted in "Sinema Trashes Dems: ‘Old Dudes Eating Jell-O’/The Arizona senator courts GOP donors by ridiculing her former Democratic colleagues" (Politico).

Phoniness is inherent in the nature of the enterprise. The real question is whether she has chosen the best way to play the game.

Kyrsten Sinema just exudes phoniness pic.twitter.com/rLQ2ta6iVe

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 11, 2022

"In Sinema’s 2009 book... she described giving up shrill partisanship, which was making her unhappy, for a vaguely New Age ethos..."

"... that prized inner tranquillity. One chapter was called 'Letting Go of the Bear and Picking Up the Buddha,' with the bear representing fear and anger. 'Picking up the Buddha (becoming a super centered political actor) makes you a stronger, more effective you,' she wrote. 'To be your most fabulous political self, you’ll need to learn to recognize the bear and learn to let go of it in your work.' Transcending fear and anger is an excellent spiritual goal. But becoming a more centered and fabulous person is a political project only when it’s directed toward aims beyond oneself. With Sinema, it’s not remotely clear what those aims might be, or if they exist. (Another chapter in her book is 'Letting Go of Outcomes.')"

Writes Michelle Goldberg in "Kyrsten Sinema Is Right. This Is Who She’s Always Been" (NYT). 

I had to look to see if Sinema is a Buddhist. She's not, so I'm giving this post my "cultural appropriation" tag. "Picking Up the Buddha" — is that an expression, some New Age cant? Or did she come up with this image of picking up and putting down entities that are not, if real life, picked up and put down?

 

Here's a NYT article from 2012, "Politicians Who Reject Labels Based on Religion"

Although raised a Mormon, Ms. Sinema is often described as a nontheist — and that suits the activists just fine....

But a campaign spokesman rejected any simple category for Ms. Sinema. “Kyrsten believes the terms ‘nontheist,’ ‘atheist’ or ‘nonbeliever’ are not befitting of her life’s work or personal character,” the spokesman, Justin Unga, said Thursday in an e-mail. “Though Sinema was raised in a religious household, she draws her policy-making decisions from her experience as a social worker who worked with diverse communities and as a lawmaker who represented hundreds of thousands.”

Furthermore, Ms. Sinema “is a student of all cultures in her community,” Mr. Unga said, and she “believes that a secular approach is the best way to achieve this in good government.” In rejecting not only religious labels but irreligious labels, too, these politicians resemble the growing portion of Americans who feel that no particular tradition, or anti-tradition, captures how they feel about God, or the universe, or what the theologian Paul Tillich called “ultimate concern.”

She waited until Warnock won, but Kyrsten Sinema just left the Democratic Party.

CNN reports. 

"We have to codify Roe v. Wade in the law, and the way to do that is to make sure the Congress votes to do that. And if the filibuster gets in the way, it’s like voting rights, we provide an exception for this, or an exception to the filibuster for this action."

Said President Biden, quoted in "Biden, Chiding Court, Endorses Ending Filibuster to Codify Abortion Rights/The president called the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade 'destabilizing' and said Congress needed to act to codify it into law" (NYT).

It was only the second time Mr. Biden has urged Congress to scrap its rules on the filibuster. In January, he called on lawmakers to make an exception to pass legislation to add voting rights protections. Speaking at a news conference in Madrid... Mr. Biden lamented the impact of the court’s decision on a woman’s right to have an abortion, calling Roe a “critical, critical piece.”

A critical, critical piece of what? I'm sure he left it hanging. The NYT would not edit him into less articulateness. Here's the full statement at the White House website: "Remarks by President Biden in Press Conference/Madrid, Spain."

Ah! An entire press conference. Interestingly, Biden had already used the phrase "critical, critical." Earlier in the press conference, a NYT reporter asked him "How long is it fair to expect American drivers and drivers around the world to pay that premium for this war?" He said:

"Whoever thought we’d see the day in American politics when a senator could be openly bisexual but a closeted Republican?”

Quipped Trevor Noah, about Kyrsten Sinema, at the White House Correspondents' dinner, quoted in "Trevor Noah roasts lawmakers on both sides of aisle in correspondents’ dinner remarks" (The Hill).

"Unless Sinema wigs out..."

Unless Sinema wigs out, that's it. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson will be joining the Supreme Court. The only question is whether Collins, Murkowski, Romney and maybe a couple of others will do the right thing. https://t.co/y1ig82BLvZ

— Dan Kennedy (@dankennedy_nu) March 25, 2022

"Some senators get so whacky in the national spotlight that they can’t function without it."

"Trump had that effect on Republicans. Before Trump, Lindsey Graham was almost a normal human being. Then Trump directed a huge amp of national attention Graham’s way, transmogrifying the senator into a bizarro creature who’d say anything Trump wanted to keep the attention coming. Not all senators are egomaniacs, of course. Most lie on an ego spectrum ranging from mildly inflated to pathological. Manchin and Sinema are near the extreme. Once they got a taste of the national spotlight, they couldn’t let go. They must have figured that the only way they could keep the spotlight focused on themselves was by threatening to do what they finally did last week: shafting American democracy."

Writes Robert Reich in "Where egos dare: Manchin and Sinema show how Senate spotlight corrupts" (The Guardian). 

Is it "whacky" or "wacky"? The author of "Common Errors in English Usage" says:

"Sinema reiterates opposition to eliminating filibuster, probably dooming Democrats’ voting rights push."

WaPo reports.

And:

[T]he circumstances in which she reiterated it — as Senate Democratic leaders prepared to launch a decisive floor debate and less than an hour before President Biden was scheduled to arrive on Capitol Hill to deliver a final, forceful appeal for action — put an exclamation point on her party’s long and fruitless effort to counter restrictive Republican-passed state voting laws.

We're told that she wore "purple, a symbol of Washington bipartisanship." There's always interest in what this Senator is wearing. So here — you can look at her as she stands in the breach:

"The form-fitting dresses and retro color palette that Sinema favors are a way of broadcasting her bona fides as a middle-class politician and thus someone in step with middle-class values."

"One might laugh at how literal this sounds as political stagecraft, but consider that almost all people in this country think of themselves as middle class, regardless of how much (or little) money they have. It is our cultural default, and we see it as normative. We use 'middle-class' interchangeably with other powerful nationalist signifiers like 'citizen,' 'voter' and 'American.' And, though my progressive comrades may balk at this comparison, if you compare Sinema to some of Congress’s best-known female politicians, her style is easily the most accessible to her constituents. I know enough about fashion, and how much it costs, to know that few American women can afford to dress like, for instance, the preternaturally turned-out Nancy Pelosi. In fact, part of what makes Sinema’s style performance so uncomfortable for many of us is how middle-class it is: She doesn’t seem to be trying to do better. But that does not mean her style story lacks aspiration.... [Her] presentation reads like 'someone who’s got a catalog budget but is trying to imagine what that high-end editorial looks like, someone who aspires to be cool and edgy.' One dimension of class in Sinema’s sartorial performance is that it is basic but aspirational, not in power, but in coolness."

Another article about Kyrsten Sinema's clothing in the NYT. This one is "How Kyrsten Sinema Uses Clothing to Signal Her Social Class" by Tressie McMillan Cottom, who is "an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of 'Thick: And Other Essays' and a 2020 MacArthur fellow."

"Senator Sinema began her Washington career... reveling in... eye-catching, idiosyncratic and colorful clothes speckled with flowers and zebra stripes..."

"... the kind that are not unusual in civilian life, but stand out like neon lights under the rotunda of the Capitol; the kind that maybe call to mind an uninhibited co-worker with a zest for retail therapy at the mall. But that the senator continued to do so as she ascended the political ranks... made her nationally recognizable.... and it placed her at the forefront of a social trend at a time when dress codes of all kinds are being reconsidered.... And, it made it clear she just wasn’t going to apologize for enjoying shopping. She clearly does a lot of it. So what? As far as she is concerned, she can have her stuff and substance too. In other words, all those seemingly kooky clothes that Ms. Sinema is wearing aren’t kooky at all. They’re signposts. And the direction they are pointing is entirely her way."

From "Decoding Kyrsten Sinema’s Style/Sometimes a dress is just a dress. Sometimes it’s a strategy" by the NYT fashion critic Vanessa Friedman.

Friedman is being awfully nice here, perhaps because it's dangerous to take shots at a woman's appearance these days. One of Sinema's clothing items is a shocking pink sweater with "DANGEROUS CREATURE" written across the chest. That caused Mitt Romney to tell her she was "breaking the internet," and, we're told, she answered, "Good." 

I don't know if she thought it was good because she'd like to see the internet broken or because she loves attention per se or — I'll go with this — she wants a lot of people to contemplate her dangerousness. Everyone with political power is dangerous, so it functions as a warning label, and warning labels decrease dangerousness. We potential victims can, perhaps, take care.

And Friedman does take care. What are the dangerous things that could be said about Kyrsten Sinema's clothes? Well, for one thing, they're in bad taste, and many times, they're unflattering. They're very tight... But don't talk about that. It's dangerous!

"2 senators cannot be allowed to defeat what 48 senators and 210 House members want."

Tweeted Bernie Sanders, quoted at Newsweek. 

Who's doing the "allowing"? All 100 Senators were elected in their state and each holds 1/100 of the power. It's not 2 against 48 but 52 against 48. There's no "allowing" going on, just an accumulation of total votes. The 2 are most certainly allowed to vote the way they choose, representing their state, and it's offensive to speak of not allowing them. 

Speaking of Sanders, here's something from Axios: 

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) withheld support for a joint statement condemning last weekend's protests against Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) because it also wouldn't include a rebuke of her political views, Axios has learned.....

An email exchange between Senate Democratic leadership aides, obtained by Axios, reveals Sanders withheld his name from a joint statement declaring protesters who followed Sinema into a bathroom — and filmed her while using the restroom — as "plainly inappropriate and unacceptable."

Was Sinema filmed using the toilet? I thought she'd retreated into the space to get away, but find it hard to believe she'd use the toilet under this pressure, unless she had a physical emergency. I realize it is possible in most public bathrooms for someone outside the stall to hold a camera over/under the wall/door of the stall and photograph a person inside. Did that happen to Sinema?

Back to Axios:

"Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., is unhappy that a group of progressive activists followed her into a bathroom over the weekend."

"Leaving aside that Sinema doesn’t get to set the terms of how her constituents hold her accountable, you know who would have likely applauded those activists’ tactics? A young Kyrsten Sinema, the one who didn’t mind calling out Democrats who are more interested in obtaining power than in using it to advance their values.... "

From "Kyrsten Sinema's bathroom protest was a long time coming/The Kyrsten Sinema of 2003 would have been among the activists protesting her at Arizona State University" by Hayes Brown (MSNBC).

There's a big difference between "calling out" politicians and hounding them physically until they retreat into the dead-end space of a bathroom stall. That's a nightmare, and anyone who's proud of doing that to her ought never to claim to understand the problem of violence against women. Not that it's acceptable to treat a man like that. But getting trapped in a small, interior space by people who are yelling at you and coming at you is a woman's nightmare.

"Some Democrats scoffed at the notion that the GOP would ever be able to deliver 10 votes needed to clear the filibuster. As of Wednesday night, they were at 11 — a number that appears likely to grow."

From "POLITICO Playbook: The inside view from the West Wing on infrastructure."

NUMBER OF THE DAY: 21. That’s how many senators now support the bipartisan infrastructure framework proposed by Sens. KYRSTEN SINEMA, JOE MANCHIN, ROB PORTMAN, BILL CASSIDY, MITT ROMNEY and the other members of their centrist group. This is big....

What does this do to the Democrat side of the equation? The fear that Sinema and Manchin will oppose a larger reconciliation package stuffed with the left’s top priorities is real.

Essentially, Democratic leaders are letting their centrists eat dessert without the veggies....

What is the dessert and what is the veggies? Seems to me the Sinema/Manchin set have a bill with just the veggies and they're saying no dessert for you lefties.

Metaphor is challenging!

She's not like other Senators.

Kyrsten Sinema, the Senate’s most colorful member, posts a pic of herself on instagram rocking a “F*** Off” ring & sipping what looks like Sangria pic.twitter.com/ec6AkEPUiE

— Melanie Zanona (@MZanona) April 18, 2021

Post headline is a reference to the "not like other girls" meme: 

Kyrsten Sinema cutely dramatized her "no" to the $15 minimum wage and some people are really mad about it.

I'm reading "Sinema Slammed For Exaggerated Thumbs-Down On $15 Minimum Wage" (HuffPo). Here's how it looked:

Did Sinema really have vote against a $15 minimum wage for 24 million people like this? pic.twitter.com/Jv0UXLKLHI

— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) March 5, 2021

We watched that about 20 times. It's hard to know why she did it like that. At first, we thought maybe she was emulating John McCain, whose dramatic down vote on the GOP health care repeal was done with a distinct hand gesture. 

But look at that — here. It's not much like what Sinema did, which was a whole body movement, bouncing down and back up as she did a sassy thumb's down. McCain held his hand out to get attention — because he was voting after the point in the roll call where his name had appeared — and when he got the attention, he briskly pointed his whole hand downward. 

McCain took the position that the left loved, and Sinema was on the side the left hates. I can't remember the worst things the right said about McCain and his dramatic moment, but the left is spewing hostility at Sinema. I'll just highlight this from Lawyers, Guns & Money: 

I get that Joe Manchin is just a narcissistic conservative asshole having the time of his life. But what the living fuck is this shit?... Of course, she’s claiming that criticism of this grotesque display is sexist...

ADDED: I think the right attitude for voting down the minimum wage is more somber. It should express something more like: I'm sorry, I want hard-working people to make more money too, but this is the wrong way to try to make that happen. The gesture Sinema gave feels more like: Ha! So there! That's not appropriate to the occasion. It makes her seem as though she doesn't even understand what she's doing.

"We’re glad Senator McConnell threw in the towel and gave up on his ridiculous demand. We look forward to organizing the Senate under Democratic control and start getting big, bold things done for the American people."

Said Justin Goodman, a spokesman for Mr. Schumer, quoted in "McConnell Relents in First Filibuster Skirmish, but the War Rages On/Senator Mitch McConnell dropped his demand that Democrats promise to preserve the procedural weapon that can grind the Senate to a halt, but with President Biden’s agenda in the balance, the fight is not over" (NYT).

Senator Mitch McConnell... had refused to agree to a plan for organizing the chamber without a pledge from Democrats to protect the filibuster, a condition that Mr. Schumer had rejected. But late Monday, as the stalemate persisted, Mr. McConnell found a way out by pointing to statements by two centrist Democrats, Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, that said they opposed getting rid of the procedural tool — a position they had held for months — as enough of a guarantee to move forward without a formal promise from Mr. Schumer.... 

As they press forward on Mr. Biden’s agenda, Democrats will come under mounting pressure from activists to jettison the rule....  “I feel pretty damn strongly, but I will also tell you this: I am here to get things done,” said Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana. “If all that happens is filibuster after filibuster, roadblock after roadblock, then my opinion may change.”...

We were just talking about Tester. Remember? He's the Senator who brings his own meat to Washington and wants to "get shit done."

Democrats say they must retain at least the threat that they could one day end the filibuster, arguing that bowing to Mr. McConnell’s demand now would only have emboldened Republicans to deploy it constantly, without fear of retaliation. “Well that’s a nonstarter because if we gave him that, then the filibuster would be on everything, every day,” Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press."  

Ah! That makes the most sense of it all. Democrats want the threat of abolishing the filibuster, and Republicans are moderated by the threat alone. Notice that actually to change the rule would require every single Democratic Senator to agree and a tiebreaker vote from Kamala Harris would still be needed. That's a lot of cohesion. 

Kyrsten Sinema is up for reelection in 2024, and she took over a seat that had been held by a Republican. The other Democratic Senator who faces reelection in 2024 and who beat a Republican incumbent in 2018 is Jacky Rosen. We don't hear much from her. As for Manchin, he's been in the Senate longer — since 2011, after the seat was vacated by the death of the Democrat/Klansman Robert Byrd (a historic filibusterer) — but Manchin too is up for reelection in 2024, and I think McConnell knows he can count on Manchin not to vote against the filibuster. 

Quite aside from this closeup, she was easy to spot in the crowd, and I noticed her clapping and standing a lot. It really made me like her!

Thanks Kyrsten! Working across the aisle on good ideas shouldn’t be such a foreign concept. https://t.co/wgb578vsvO

— Tim Scott (@SenatorTimScott) February 5, 2020