Physicists: Known Universe Too Small For Kyrsten Sinema To F**k Off Far Enough
Don't let the door hit you in the quirky fashion sense.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Arizona) announced Tuesday that she won’t run for reelection this year, leaving the fall campaign to Democrat Ruben Gallego and Republican loser Kari Lake, although the latter hasn’t said whether she will step down from pretending she won the governorship in 2022. Probably best not to make any hasty decisions, since if she loses in the Senate election, she can then take up the job of pretending she’s Arizona’s junior senator.
Sinema’s three-minute video announcement on Twitter offered exactly the fake-triumphant tone that has so endeared her to voters for the last few years:
Sinema bemoaned all the partisanship that frustrated her so much that she just had to make a big show of voting against raising the minimum wage, refuse to roll back any of Donald Trump’s tax cuts, limit the government’s ability to negotiate Medicare drug prices, and keep the filibuster in place instead of protecting voting or abortion rights, which we’ll assume are both far too partisan for her.
Not that she went into any of those details. Rather, she claimed that she was a martyr for decency and hard work and bipartisanship, and everyone else is corrupt: “Because I choose civility, understanding, listening, working together to get stuff done, I will leave the Senate at the end of this year,” yadda yadda.
Now, it’s true that Sinema did get some useful things done: Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) wrote on Twitter about how when they worked on the 2022 gun bill after the Uvalde massacre, and Sinema kept working on her priority of closing the “boyfriend loophole” that allowed domestic abusers to keep their guns if they weren’t married to their victims. Sinema was also a chief architect of the post-Dobbs “Respect for Marriage Act” that provides as much protection for same-sex unions as possible short of a constitutional amendment.
But good lord what a pile of other wreckage she left behind as she blocked key parts of Joe Biden’s first-term agenda. Let us briefly review some of her worst moments.
Thumbs Down To Minimum Wage Hike
When Democrats passed the American Rescue Plan using the reconciliation process, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that one part of the bill, an increase in the minimum wage, couldn’t be included as part of the simple-majority vote, and would be subject to the filibuster. That effectively doomed it, since it could never get 10 Republican votes. Ultimately, eight Senate Democrats voted against the measure, including Sinema — but nobody remembers those other seven “no” votes, thanks to Sinema’s grandstanding thumbs-down and curtsy, as if she were channeling John McCain’s historic vote that saved Obamacare from the flames of Trumpism.
The gesture reeked of contempt for working people. We’re still disgusted.
Standing Up For Millionaires And Corporations
The negotiations over Biden’s Build Back Better proposal truly gave Sinema the chance to become a Disney villain, although she somehow never actually showed up on the Senate floor wearing a coat made of puppies. While her fellow chaos agent Joe Manchin deservedly gets most of the credit for killing off Build Back Better, Sinema made a point of dickishly keeping America from having nice things, too. Manchin mostly focused on limiting or eliminating good things in the bill, like his insistence that the expanded child tax credit had to go because he figured low-income parents would just blow the cash on booze and drugs.
But Sinema preferred to attack the funding parts of the bill, without which it was harder to pay for major new safety net programs like universal pre-K, childcare, in-home care, family leave, the child tax credit, and more. Unlike pretty much every other Democrat who’d run on rescinding Donald Trump’s Big Fat Tax Cuts for Rich Fuckwads, Sinema made clear that she wouldn’t allow any income tax increases on the wealthy or on corporations, a position that actually put her to the right of Joe Manchin, who was actually fine with undoing Trump’s tax cuts, although he wanted a milder increase in corporate taxes.
Funny thing: While she was refusing any new taxes for the very wealthy, Sinema was also getting a lot of loving campaign-finance attention from big GOP donors.
While she was at it, Sinema also demanded cutbacks to Build Back Better’s provision negotiating lower prices for prescription drugs for Medicare, a limitation that remained when the provision came back as part of 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act.
One More Favor To The Super-Rich!
Speaking of the IRA, let’s not forget that Sinema even managed to gum up a major provision of the big climate, healthcare, and taxes bill that the administration finally got Joe Manchin on board with. But again, Sinema insisted she would only sign on if the bill were shorn of one of its funding provisions, the elimination of the odious “carried interest loophole.” That’s a sneaky little quirk in the tax code that’s used almost exclusively by investment managers and venture capitalists to artificially reduce their tax liability. So hooray, the super-wealthy got another break.
Filibuster Reform Dies Here
And finally, there was Sinema’s (and Manchin’s) refusal to end the filibuster on legislation, which deep-sixed the very voting reform bill that Manchin had written. She insisted, wrongly, that the filibuster had been designed by the Founders (it was not!) and that it promoted bipartisan working together and compromise, when in reality the filibuster had mostly been a means of blocking civil rights legislation before Mitch McConnell made it so that every Democratic bill automatically required 60 votes to pass.
That one was enough to win Sinema a big thumbs-down from the Arizona Democratic Party, which censured her for blocking voting rights.
Sinema later left the Democrats altogether, and here we are, saying goodbye for good, hooray!
HER.
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"The negotiations over Biden’s Build Back Better proposal truly gave Sinema the chance to become a Disney villain, although she somehow never actually showed up on the Senate floor wearing a coat made of puppies."
Correction: That we KNOW of.
It's quite a trick to fuck the most basic initiatives for which you were elected to uphold and then claim that the fuckery was some sort of magical strategery for which your constituents should be grateful. Sparkle magic, indeed. She and her ego and her blood money donations can take a long walk off a short pier.