Above image: h/t Salon.
Arizona’s prima donna Democratic diva, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, does not have time to answer questions from the press or meet with her constituents to explain her bizarre “Silent Sinema” behavior or why she is sabotaging the Biden agenda, and also appeasing GQP fascism with her unprincipled and incoherent support for the Jim Crow relic Senate filibuster rule.
But she does have time to star in a video with Mr. 47 percent, Mitt Romney, trolling her constituents who elected her to office by playing a character who intentionally tries to tank her own team in Ted Lasso. This is her version of Melania Trump’s “I don’t care, do you?”
The Daily Beast reports, Sinema and Romney Embarrass Themselves With ‘Ted Lasso’ Cosplay Amid Biden Bill Drama:
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) has once again —and perhaps purposely—found herself the focus of pointed criticism, this time for finding the time to engage in some cheesy cosplay with Republican colleague Mitt Romney while Democrats scramble to pass some semblance of President Joe Biden’s signature social spending package.
With Halloween nearing, Romney spent much of Thursday morning posting several tweets of himself dressed as the title character of the hit Apple TV+ series Ted Lasso. Sporting Lasso’s signature mustache, Romney filmed himself inhabiting the character’s starry-eyed optimism in a series of short scenes posted to Twitter.
Since Republicans have abandoned governing, trolling is what they do with all their free time, at taxpayer expense.
The series is about an American college football coach—portrayed by Jason Sudeikis—hired to coach an English soccer team. While much of the show focuses on Lasso’s ability to win over his players with unrelenting charm and folksy cheerfulness, it also depicts him building a friendship with the team’s cold-hearted owner Rebecca Welton, who initially set out to sabotage her own team.
Throughout his series of Lasso tweets, Romney eventually revealed that Sinema had joined him on his cosplaying journey. Sitting on an art-deco couch dressed as Welton, the Democratic lawmaker received a box of biscuits from Romney’s Lasso (a play on the show’s “biscuits with the boss” scenes between the Welton and Lasso characters).
Romney also added another tweet with Sinema, sharing a picture of him handing her the box of biscuits complete with the caption: “She’s one tough cookie.”
She’s one tough cookie. pic.twitter.com/VMzPiHk5YX
— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) October 28, 2021
Considering that Sinema—alongside fellow centrist Democrat Joe Manchin—has been a major hurdle to passing Biden’s Build Back Better agenda-setting bill, and is seen as the main reason the social spending package has been severely gutted, Thursday’s tweets were unsurprisingly met with intense backlash.
Several observers, for instance, noted that Sinema was portraying a character who was actively trying to destroy her own soccer franchise, drawing parallels to Sinema’s objections to much of the provisions in the Democratic bill. “It should be noted that Sinema is playing a character who tries to tank her own team,” political reporter Taegan Goddard tweeted.
While liberals and progressives were expectedly furious over the tweets, seeing it as a “Rome burns” moment, others noted how similar Sinema’s actions were to another iconic political moment.
“This has major “I don’t care, do you?” [v]ibes,” Cook Political Report editor-in-chief Amy Walter noted.
Earlier, Politico reported, Sinema reached prescription drug negotiation deal with Biden:
Kyrsten Sinema [aka “Pharma Girl”] struck an agreement on prescription drug pricing with President Joe Biden as part of Democrats’ social spending talks, though it’s at risk of ultimately being excluded as the party tries to reach a deal that can pass.
The Arizona Democrat was somewhat reluctant to strike a deal on prescription drug price negotiation, a key campaign plank for many Democrats. But a source familiar said the president and Sinema were able to see eye to eye in the end.
“Sinema struck a deal with President Biden to include Medicare drug negotiation in the framework, consistent with the proposal authored by Congressman Scott Peters, with some edits in the insulin space to further lower costs for consumers. It is unclear if it will be included in the framework this morning — that decision was left with House leadership and Chairman Pallone,” the source said.
House Democrats fired back on Thursday. A Democratic aide said they were never party to the Sinema-White House agreement and saw it as a “Trojan horse devised by Big Pharma.”
The prescription drug pricing language was ultimately left out of the framework the White House released publicly on Thursday morning, leaving its fate uncertain. Many progressives view the Peters proposal as insufficient, and a senior administration official said that drug pricing reform lacks the votes in Congress at the moment to advance.
An aide to the Energy and Commerce Committee said it never received a deal between Biden and Sinema and was not involved in back-and-forth negotiations about it. Pallone (D-N.J.) declined to say whether he had spoken to Sinema and said he believed ultimately Democrats will reach agreement on the issue.
“If we don’t, it’s only because [the pharmaceutical industry]’s really trying to kill everything and try to convince their lackeys, as they call them in Congress, not to do anything,” Pallone said.
Adding the drug pricing compromise to any final bill, if Biden tries to do so, would test whether he can coax progressives into a deal struck with Sinema, one of two high-profile holdouts for a party-line spending bill that’s now been cut in half from its initial $3.5 trillion target. Democrats may dislike what Sinema negotiated, but rejecting the president’s work would be altogether different.
That the White House has instead, for now, fully dropped drug pricing from the bill is a testament to the power of the pharmaceutical industry, which has for months poured millions of dollars into lobbying and advertising to kill the effort. Peters has pointed to the 100,000-plus drug industry jobs in his district to argue for a lighter touch in cost controls.
“It is really outrageous that year after year, members of Congress talk about the high cost of prescription drugs. And yet, year after year, we are not able to do anything about it,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Prescription drug reform would bring in significant new revenues to help fund [the American Families Act aka the Democratic budget reconciliation bill], making it important not only on policy grounds but also on paying for the bill.
Salon reports, Pro-pharma Democrats kill bill to lower drug costs — advocates ask: “What did they get for that?” (excerpt):
It was the “ugliest night” the late Rep. Walter Jones, a North Carolina Republican, said he had witnessed in two decades in politics. That came when members of his party allied with Big Pharma orchestrated a daring late-night coup in 2003, ramming through a bill written by industry lobbyists that would shower hundreds of billions on drug companies. Health care advocates experienced flashbacks this week when Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and a group of House Democrats aligned with pharmaceutical lobbyists effectively torpedoed their own party’s efforts to claw back more than $400 billion in prescription-drug costs for consumers and taxpayers.
The White House on Thursday dropped a plan to at least partially reverse the 2003 Republican-backed law banning Medicare from negotiating drug prices after progressives balked at a last-minute bid by Sinema and other pharma-allied Democrats to add industry-friendly protections and massive restrictions on any potential negotiations.
Leslie Dach, chair of the health care advocacy group Protect Our Care, accused the group of “moderate” Democrats who killed the bill this week of “basically doing the handiwork of pharma and standing against patients.”
The new White House framework marks a massive setback to years of Democratic efforts to undo the damage from an 18-year-old provision championed by pharmaceutical industry ally Rep. Billy Tauzin, a Louisiana Democrat-turned-Republican who then wielded immense power as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The legislation extended prescription drug coverage to tens of millions of Medicare recipients — but required them to buy drugs from private insurers and banned Medicare from negotiating bulk price discounts. After months of negotiations, Tauzin and Republican leaders backed by the drug companies dropped the 1,000-page bill in the middle of the night and gave members just hours to vote on it.
“The pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote [that] bill,” Jones told “60 Minutes” in 2007. “The bill was over 1,000 pages. And it got to the members of the House that morning, and we voted for it at about 3 a.m. in the morning.” (Jones died in 2019.)
Republican leaders even allowed hundreds of lobbyists onto the House floor to whisper promises or threats in members’ ears, after realizing there were not enough votes to pass the legislation. Lobbyists made their way around the chamber, allegedly promising retribution against lawmakers who opposed the vote. One member broke down in tears, Jones recalled. The vote, which was supposed to take 15 minutes, stretched to nearly three hours as industry forces tried to cajole enough members into backing the bill.
Republican leaders ordered the C-SPAN cameras in the chamber to be shut off during the stunning session. “A lot of the shenanigans that were going on that night, they didn’t want on national television in primetime,” former Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., told “60 Minutes.”
The episode underscored the immense power of the pharmaceutical industry, which had contributed nearly $1 million to Tauzin, and the lengths the industry was willing to go. The Medicare non-negotiation rule was a enormous boon to the industry, allowing it to charge Medicare recipients far more than it charges other government agencies like the Department of Veterans Affairs, which, like all other agencies, is allowed to bargain with its contractors and vendors. The cost of the program also ended up being far higher than the price tag sold to lawmakers after Bush administration Medicare chief Tom Scully, himself a former lobbyist, ordered his agency to conceal an analysis that projected the true cost of the bill from lawmakers. Several members of Congress said later they would not have supported the legislation if they knew the real price tag — but what was done was done.
Just 10 days after the bill was signed, Scully landed a job as a pharmaceutical lobbyist, a position he had negotiated while working on the bill. Weeks after that, Tauzin negotiated a new job as the chief lobbyist for Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the industry’s leading lobbying arm. After finishing his current term in Congress, he went to work for PhRMA with an annual salary of $2 million. At least 15 fellow Republican lawmakers and congressional staffers who worked on the bill also landed lucrative industry lobbying jobs not long after the bill was signed.
I suspect that this is what “Pharma Girl” is doing now, because her political future is over, and she knows it.
When Sinema and pro-pharma allies like Reps. Scott Peters, D-Calif., Kurt Schrader, D-Ore. and Kathleen Rice, D-N.Y., staged a last-minute push to undermine the party’s plans to reverse the 2003 law — amid another all-out lobbying blitz — some patient advocates said they couldn’t help experiencing déjà vu.
The lawmakers are “taking orders from pharma,” David Mitchell, the founder of the patient advocacy group Patients for Affordable Drugs Now, said in an interview with Salon. “What did they get for that? We know that pharma will do anything unethical, immoral.”
* * *
PhRMA has led a massive lobbying blitz to kill President Biden’s proposal to scrap the non-negotiation rule, a change that could raise more than $460 billion over the next decade to pay for health care priorities in his Build Back Better plan that now also appear to be on the chopping block. The group has already spent more than $22 million on lobbying on drug pricing and other issues this year, while the pharmaceutical industry as a whole has spent an unprecedented $171 million on lobbying so far in 2021, according to data from OpenSecrets.
PhRMA has particularly focused on lobbying Democratic holdouts on Biden’s proposal, including Sinema, Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey and Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware. The industry has also showered cash on lawmakers looking to block Medicare negotiation from making it into the Democrats’ reconciliation bill, donating $1 million to Sinema, Menendez and Peters through September, according to OpenSecrets data. Sinema reached a deal with the White House on a plan aligned with Peters’ proposal, according to Politico, but progressives rejected the deal, leading the Biden administration to drop it from a framework released on Thursday.
[H]ouse Democrats said Thursday that they were cut out of Sinema’s deal-making with the White House but vowed to press forward to include Medicare negotiation in the final bill. “If we don’t, it’s only because [the pharmaceutical industry]’s really trying to kill everything and try to convince their lackeys, as they call them in Congress, not to do anything,” House Energy and Commerce Chairman Frank Pallone, D-N.J., who sponsored a House version of the original legislation, told the outlet.
Nearly all the lawmakers opposed to the legislation are from areas with a large pharmaceutical presence and have received eye-popping contributions from the industry. Sinema has collected more than $500,000 from the industry throughout her career. Peters has received more than $850,000. Menendez has taken more than $1.1 million, no doubt reflecting the numerous pharmaceutical companies headquartered in New Jersey.
Mitchell drew a distinction between Menendez and Carper, on the one hand, and Sinema and her House allies on the other. Menendez and Carper, he said, were “trying to slim it down,” while Sinema and the group of House Democrats were “trying to wreck it, they’re trying to defeat it completely.”
“They are the handmaidens of the industry,” he said. “At this moment, they are working for the drug companies. They’re not working for their constituents.”
As Jonathan Cohn writes, Kyrsten Sinema Is Acting Like A Pharma Ally, Which Doesn’t Seem Very Mavericky (excerpt):
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) says she wants to be just like John McCain, the former Republican senator who was also from Arizona and famous for his independent streak.
That makes it a little hard to understand her objections to a key Democratic health care proposal that the pharmaceutical industry hates and that John McCain, once upon a time, said he supported.
[T]he pharmaceutical initiative is an especially pivotal part of Build Back Better, because it would reduce what Medicare spends on drugs for seniors, freeing up dollars that could go to other initiatives. More important, it would help millions of Americans who struggle to pay for their medications today.
Providing that kind of relief has been a longtime cause for Democratic Party leaders, going back to 2003, when President George W. Bush and GOP allies first added a drug benefit to the Medicare program and included a provision explicitly prohibiting the government from regulating pieces.
But not every Republican was on board with that decision. Among the GOP critics was McCain.
“Taxpayers should be able to expect Medicare, as a large purchaser of prescription drugs, to be able to derive some discount from its new market share,” McCain said back then. “Instead, taxpayers will provide an estimated $13 billion a year in increased profits to the pharmaceutical industry.”
McCain was even more explicit ― and dismayed ― at a hearing he chaired.
“Why in the world, if we’re interested in lower prices for prescription drugs, would we put a prohibition in that Medicare can’t use its market share to negotiate better prices for drug companies?” McCain said. “I mean, it makes no sense. … Why in the world would we do such a thing if we’re interested in lower prices?”
At that same hearing, McCain even said the prohibition validated attacks on the drug industry from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who at the time was serving in the House and arguing, as he does today, for government negotiation of drug prices.
Years later, when McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign campaign ran an ad touting his record of fighting the pharmaceutical industry, Politifact rated it “mostly true.” As proof, they cited his previous efforts to allow reimportation of drugs from Canada ― and the joy he seemed to take attacking the industry rhetorically.
During a GOP primary debate, when a rival warned against turning drug companies into “the big bad guys,” McCain piped up to say, “but they are.”
Reminder: Sinema during her 2018 Senate campaign ran an ad touting her commitment to lowering prescription drug prices — which, in Democratic Party circles, usually means supporting aggressive negotiation of drug prices.
Cohn concludes: “This time Democrats are talking about something much more ambitious ― and, amazingly, they’re on the verge of doing it. But it would require defying what many people consider the most powerful lobby in Washington. It’s the kind of fight McCain relished having and one Democrats need Sinema to join.”
Don’t hold your breath.
Discover more from Blog for Arizona
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Kenny Stancil reports, “Progressives Say ‘It’s Not Too Late’ to Prevent Big Pharma From Destroying Democrats’ Drug Price Promise”, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/10/29/progressives-say-its-not-too-late-prevent-big-pharma-destroying-democrats-drug-price
While expressing their frustration with the gutting of President Joe Biden’s agenda to tax corporations and the wealthy to fund expanded public benefits and climate action, healthcare advocates are stressing that there is still an opportunity for progressive lawmakers to fight for the inclusion of expanded Medicare benefits and lower drug prices in the Democratic Party’s not-yet-finalized reconciliation bill.
“The White House’s latest draft of the Build Back Better package is deeply flawed,” Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, said Thursday in a statement. “Not only does the draft fail to lower drug prices, it also fails to add dental and vision benefits to Medicare.”
“There’s nothing more popular with voters across the political spectrum than allowing Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices, and using the savings to expand Medicare benefits,” Lawson continued.
Surveys show that 84% of U.S. adults, including nearly nine in 10 Democrats, support the party’s proposal to expand Medicare to cover dental, hearing, and vision services for tens of millions of seniors. Roughly the same percentage of voters want Medicare to be empowered to reduce the costs of medications, for which Americans pay two to four times more than people in other countries.
Pointing to the widespread, bipartisan support for such long-standing goals, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said earlier this week that “Congress must finally have the courage to stand up to the greed of Big Pharma.”
To appease a few right-wing Democratic obstructionists, however, Biden’s recently unveiled Build Back Better framework proposes slashing the previously agreed-upon 10-year spending level in half, from $3.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion, which would result in several devastating cuts.
While drug price reform and dental and vision benefits are among the casualties for now, Lawson argued that “it’s not too late for congressional Democrats to listen to the people.”
Social Security Works urged people to tell their members of Congress that the Build Back Better Act “must include these vital priorities,” which the advocacy group said will require Democratic lawmakers to pressure the party’s conservative holdouts to “stop their sabotage.”
Just a handful of corporate-funded Democrats are standing in the way of expanding Medicare benefits and authorizing the federal government to negotiate lower drug prices, including Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), Bob Menendez (N.J.), and Joe Manchin (W.Va.), as well as Reps. Kathleen Rice (N.Y.), Scott Peters (Calif.), and Kurt Schrader (Ore.).
“Democrats still have a huge opportunity to deliver on a promise they have been making for decades to lower drug prices,” Margarida Jorge, head of Lower Drug Prices Now, said Thursday in a statement. “They should not toss it away to accommodate Republicans and a handful of pharma-backed Democrats in the House and Senate who support Big Pharma’s interests over those of their own constituents.”
Calling it “bad policy and bad politics” to leave pharmaceutical corporations “in charge of drug prices while one-third of Americans ration or go without medicine,” Jorge added that “we urge lawmakers in Congress to amend this framework to include serious reform and keep their promise to lower drug prices.”
The lack of a new dental benefit for Medicare recipients in the Build Back Better Act is “unacceptable,” stressed the Medicare Rights Center, which said that the omission “must be addressed before either chamber of Congress votes on the bill. There is way too much need and the policy is way too popular to not cover dental in Medicare.”
[Sen.] Sanders, meanwhile, has pledged to keep fighting to get vision care, dental care, and lower drug prices into the social welfare and climate package, which can be passed through the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process but only with the support of all 50 Senate Democrats and all but three House Democrats.
Biden’s current Build Back Better framework has “major gaps in it,” Sanders told The Hill on Thursday, adding that “the American people are very, very clear that they’re sick and tired of paying the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.”
Vowing to strengthen the bill, Sanders said that “we have got to move forward to dental, as well as eyeglasses and the cost of prescription drugs.”
And Sanders may not be alone. According to Politico reporter Alice Miranda Ollstein, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) on Thursday insisted that “drug pricing will be in the final bill, despite its exclusion” from the current framework. Echoing Sanders’ message from earlier this week, Wyden reportedly called the provision “non-negotiable.”
Wyden “is absolutely right,” said Social Security Works. “Democrats ran on lowering drug prices. Seniors and working families across the country are counting on them to keep that promise” in the Build Back Better Act.
[R]esearchers from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) called it “deeply disappointing that the framework does not include any language on negotiating drug prices.”
“The public pays for drug research, and federal law gives the pharmaceutical industry patent monopolies on the products produced with this publicly funded research,” said the group of political economists. “The industry should not be allowed to charge whatever it wants for drugs that are needed for people’s lives or health.”
Jorge from Lower Drug Prices Now said that “letting Big Pharma keep their monopoly power to price-gouge patients on everything from insulin to cancer drugs means that millions of Americans continue to face tough choices between putting food on their table and taking the prescriptions they need to stay alive.”
“To build back better,” she added, “lawmakers must stand up to Big Pharma, rather than protect the status quo that enables drug corporations to continue making massive profits while workers, employers, and patients struggle to get access to affordable medicines.”
Politico reported that “progressives on Capitol Hill say they plan to keep pushing back against the industry’s influence, particularly on the drug pricing front.”
Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.) told the news outlet that “it’s unconscionable right now, frankly, after all these years and with the popularity of this issue, that we haven’t gotten this done.”
“I’m not interested in crumbs,” she added. “The danger of doing some half-assed version is that all of a sudden, people think, ‘Oh, we got something on prescription drugs, so we’re not gonna do anything else.'”
Alluding to Big Pharma’s deadly profiteering earlier this week, Sanders asked: “How many people need to die, how many people need to get unnecessarily sicker, how many people will needlessly suffer before the Congress will summon the courage to finally take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry?”
Speaking to a group of reporters Wednesday night, one day before Biden’s framework was released, Sanders said that “the challenge that we face in this really unusual moment in American history is whether we have the courage to stand with the American people and take on very powerful special interests.”
“If we fail—in my view, if the American people do not believe that government can work for them and is dominated by powerful special interests, the very fabric of American democracy is in danger,” he added.
That sentiment was shared by Kelli Rhee, who wrote Friday in The Hill that “the Biden administration needs to decide whether those Big Pharma profits are worth forcing American families to the financial brink.”
“For the first time in 15 years, Democrats have the opportunity to pass the serious drug pricing reform that voters have been demanding—and politicians have been promising,” noted Rhee. “We can’t wait another 15 years. The time to act is now. Because if he fails, President Biden isn’t going to get a second chance.”
Lawson from Social Security Works, meanwhile, emphasized that “the final Build Back Better package must include robust provisions to lower drug prices and expand Medicare.”
“We need a package,” he added, “that’s built for working people, not for Big Pharma lobbyists.”
“Not only does the draft fail to lower drug prices, it also fails to add dental and vision benefits to Medicare.”
It’s interesting that the DINO obstructionists will allow hearing benefits but not vision or dental.
How do you figure they came up with this? Sinema and Manchin must have told Joe he could have one out of three but no more. So how did they choose? Well, old people can live on oatmeal and mashed bananas so do they really need teeth? And who needs vision after 65? If old people can hear the TV they don’t need to see it. So hearing it is!!
Don’t you just love how those two vandals presented their party with a destructive Sophie’s Choice? Whatever happens to either one electorally, history will not be kind & their souls will reside in eternal damnation.
WB, I don’t think Sinema could get re-elected to catch dogs. But if her 2024 campaign stash is as good as 2018, she’ll have over 22 million $$$ to walk away with. And maybe that’s what all of this has been about. She started hanging out with multi-millionaires and wanted that for herself.
She set fire to her political career, and it really looks like she doesn’t care.
Say it with me now….Thanks Chuck!!!!
I think it’s safe to assume that hearing benefits will benefit the hearing aide companies.
Those things are too expensive for most people, probably a few million people.
If the government pays for them, which I’m all for, the hearing aide makers make money.
A pair of glasses is cheap, and you can chew with a few teeth missing.
But if you can’t hear you have a lot of challenges.
It’s always about the money.
Well, Big Pharma is good at bribery, they’ve been doing it for a long time. With the 50/50 split in the Senate they only needed to buy one Democrat, and they picked the one who was the most inexperienced, weakest, and corruptible.
What did they know that we didn’t?
Kyrsten Sinema is a terrible mistake made by the Democrats and one that will cost us for years and years. We can only hope that a lesson has been learned.
The Romney-Sinema skit is just vile, beyond comprehension. But I would imagine that guys like Romney are very grateful to Sinema for representing the GOP and they will use her as long as they need her.
Maybe you can turn this into a bumper sticker: Laurie Roberts writes, “Next time you pay for costly medicines, think of Sinema”, https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/2021/10/28/sen-kyrsten-sinema-delivers-pharmaceutical-companies/6178914001/
“Kyrsten Sinema is a terrible mistake made by the Democrats and one that will cost us for years and years. We can only hope that a lesson has been learned.”
Don’t believe those national party leaders are capable of learning. Sinema was picked as she was a leader of the Congressional Blue Dogs, a corrosive anti-progressive bunch. The same mistake is being made in Florida where Val Demings is the anointed one and Pennsylvania where the same status is being bequeathed upon Conor Lamb. Neither of which have any legislative accomplishments to speak of.